“I Felt a Funeral in My Brain” by Emily Dickinson

This poem is often regarded as a descent into madness, and I am not going to argue with the experts. However, I have always experienced the body of the poem as a transition from parts (an “Ear”… a “strange Race”) to pure experience in the final stanza, just as the shedding of the mortal shell, perhaps, propels some deeper part of ourselves into the intangible Universe. We always think of death and dying as a hyper-emotional experience, and it can be, but the solemnity and poignancy of the writing both evokes emotion and removes it from the focal point of the experience. They “hit a World” on their way down, but no sense of pain is reflected back from the occurrence. The numbness of loss is common in discourse, but so perhaps does death itself numb the senses as to refine what “experience” could mean beyond the human realm. We go from “felt” to “ceased knowing” in the breadth of a few stanzas. Does “ceased knowing” mean that the speaker lacks understanding of the experience they are having? Or that they can no longer be aware of a “self” at all? Does a break in human “Reason” truly equate with madness? Or a spiritual journey that cannot be comprehended on our plane? Perhaps, I am reaching, but although death may be universal, it is also personal. Our “truth” may simply be how we feel about it, how we read and interpet it, and how we may ultimately experience it.