Emily Dickinson's Diction

Despite the title “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”, Emily Dickinson was nowhere near out of creativity as she had written 366 poems that year. In the poem she uses poetic devices including paradoxical elements, metaphors, and diction to convey the emotions to occur for the speaker in the event of the mind’s creativity dying. Even though there was no obvious struggle in her writing, she still writes passionately about this feeling of death within her mind.
Throughout the Poem, Dickinson uses phrases with paradoxes to emphasize her message. For example, from the start she writes as if something in her brain had run out of ideas or perished from being empty and it began to be referred to like a proper death. In order to the mourn this death, it

The usage of all things in the brain, mind, and person being compared to the aspects of a funeral and this dark undertone of the soul representing the foundation adds to how the speaker felt. Despite mentioning mourners and other entities at this funeral, very little is described about the faces and emotions of the other aspects besides the main mind. This defines the mood “as all the heavens were a bell, and being, but an ear, and I, and silence, some strange race wrecked, solitary, here–” (lines 13-16). The heavens were ringing for the death and the only attenders to the funeral are the body and the mind were only there to listen because the speaker is left alone to themselves and only has silence to go against. The way the author describes the lonesomeness gives off the assumption that the speaker is talking to themselves for that is why they feel they only have silence to confide

Such as “when they all were seated, a Service, like a drum–kept beating–beating–till I thought my mind was going numb–” (lines 5-8).The drum represents the heartbeat still beating and running through the brain like during a service, but as the heart is still beating, there is still a sense of dread and mourning for what no longer lives inside the body. Feeling numb when a sense of creativity has died, the speaker hears “them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead, again” (lines 9-11). Here, the box is referring to a coffin and the creativity was left in it, ready for the burial. The soul is like the old wooden floor of the ceremony as it creaks across like an echo to the pang and the feeling in speaker’s heart as the boots of lead heavily drag their feet across as a representation of a weight on the