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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” is one of many Emily Dickinson intensely lyrical poems about death. It is comparable to other famous works, such as “Because I could not stop for Death” (1863), in which death takes the speaker on something like a date. Another poem on a similar theme is “It was not Death, for I stood up” (1862), in which Dickinson couples death and keen suffering and doesn’t provide a clear lesson for either; this poem too ends on a dangling “then” (Line 20) like “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” Turning the tables, “My life had stood — a Loaded Gun,” gives the speaker the power to kill. While in “I felt a Funeral,” the speaker has a different kind of power, imagining the mind’s funeral. Dickinson reinforces this almighty power of the mind in “The Brain—is wider than the Sky” (1862), which compares cognition to the sky and to God.
Some of Dickinson’s poetic descendants are 20th-century American confessional poets, whose work tackles similar weighty issues of death and acute suffering. Though people often read Dickinson’s poetry as somewhat confessional—a guide to her feelings—they’re too puzzling to qualify as outright confessions.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson