My first-ever sad poems! Hooray!

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" ("I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," 1).

Emily Dickinson "felt a Funeral in [her] Brain" (1), which I think reveals a lot about the imagery in the poem. She felt the numbness of her mind (8) and the "Boots of Lead" (11), and she heard the beating of Drums (6) and the lifting and creaking of a box "across [her] Soul" (9-10). She felt and heard, but she did not see, so her imagery was confined mostly to those two senses. The images still conveyed the somberness and pain of a funeral, but it was fresh to me because I (presumably like most people) associate events with what we see. Dickinson gave me the perspective of feeling and hearing the event.

Now, I'm going to defend my belief about what happens to the speaker in the final stanza -- she dies. She imagines the feeling of a funeral in her brain for the duration of the poem, and that picture in her mind becomes real when she herself dies at the conclusion. She "dropped down, and down" (18), and death is often associated with descent. She "hit a World" (19) because it was new to her -- she was unfamiliar with death, so it hit her when she died. She "Finished knowing" (20) because she lost consciousness, something that seems to happen when people die.

I'm skipping "The Widow's Lament" in my blog posts, but I have a theory I wish to express. The poem is extremely depressing, which is obvious, but I think that the reason the poem is extremely depressing is that the poet himself had an extremely depressing life because his name is "William Williams."