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The True Ending of One’s Life Afterlife of a person has
been a pondering question that has been thought over centuries. The only thing
that people are able to do is to just assume what might happen. Emily
Dickinson’s poem I felt a Funeral in My Brain
(280) is a poem which describes the poet’s thought of what would happen
after one’s death. The narrator of the poem is seen as a corpse inside the
coffin, sensing the funeral through her ears. Although it may seem that the
whole poem is describing all the scenes taking place at the funeral, shifts in
the setting add further significance to the theme. Uses of poetic devices such
as repetition, caesura, rhymes and denotations throughout the poem support her
ideas about the afterlife. The first two stanzas of the poem describe what is
happening to the speaker by using repetition. The poem shows the setting of the
poem in a funeral: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” (1). The speaker further
describes the process of the funeral from line 2-8. Repetition is prominent in
these lines “Kept treading – treading – till it seemed” (2) and “Kept beating –
beating – till I thought” (7) which shows the process of a funeral taking
place. Another poetic device which is outstanding
in the whole poem is caesura. Dickinson intentionally concluded lines with
commas and dashes to haul the poem farther and keeps the pace of the poem
running. The change of the setting
in the third stanza is beginning to reveal the theme. Lines 9 – 11 describes
the speaker of the poem being carried away in a coffin “And then I heard them
lift a Box / And creak across my Soul” (9 – 10). A possible meaning that the
word “Box” can have is the coffin which the carcass of the speaker is being
carried away. She hears a “creak across my Soul”, which shows that her soul is being
removed from the body. By the “Boots of Lead”, which appear to be the sound
coming from something that is transferring her to somewhere else, her death is
coming nearer towards her. The setting and the focus is beginning to shift,
starting from line 12: “Then Space – began to toll,” (12). A device that
Dickinson uses to describe how the speaker was shifted can be noticed from “toll”.
The 2nd meaning of “toll” is to announce the person’s death in a
funeral service. The meaning that “the Space began to toll” can be interpreted as
the speaker’s death. The “Space”, is notifying the speaker that she is dead.
Then the setting alters to the afterlife, or the heaven. The first line of the
fourth stanza makes it clear that the speaker’s destination is the “Heaven”. Throughout
the fourth stanza, the speaker describes how the “Being” only has to listen. “As
all the Heavens were a Bell” (13) and “And Being, but an Ear” (14) is
describing that the heaven is full of sounds. The third and last line of the
fourth stanza is marking significance to the entire poem. “And I, and Silence,
some strange Race” (15) From the lines above, the speaker already explained to
us that the heaven is full of sounds. However, line 15 is a proof that the
speaker is actually having an illusion of the heaven. From “And I, and Silence”,
the speaker realizes that the real surrounding is actually silent and dead. She
feels desperate, alone, and dead from waking up from her delusion. “Wrecked,
solitary, here – “shows her feeling, that she is forsaken from the God. Then
again, the use of caesura at the end of stanza four leads us to the conclusion
of the poem. The speaker begins the
stanza by portraying her broke in Reason. From “And then a Plank in Reason,
broke,” (17), the speaker’s state of being unconscious is coming nearer. The
last two lines of the stanza illustrates herself being plunged into death and
being unconscious. While she is dropping
down and down into the deep and long way down to her death, she is being struck
from the “World” or the surrounding. “And hit a World, at every plunge,” (19)
This line emphasizes how weak a human being is by describing how helpless the
speaker is in the process of death. From the last line, she is now fully
unconscious and finished knowing of what is happening. In the very last end of
the poem, the speaker still leaves a caesura, which is indicating that it may not
be the end. The use of “ – then – “ intrigues us until the very last part of
the poem. Dickinson cautiously used the
last line of the poem to leave a lingering imagery. Although nobody will ever be sure of the real ending in their lives, Dickinson shares her opinion of the afterlife that may happen to one. With using a cautiously formatted poetic devices and describing every stage of death, the ending leaves us with a ponderous question to us. Is “Death” really the end or will there be another new start? 시 내용은 말고 문법+문장구조 위주로 평가 부탁드립니다 |