Brain Funerals Are The Worst

In Emily Dickinson's poem, I Felt A Funeral In My Brain, I got a sense that the funeral was symbolic of her descent into insanity. The mentioning of "sense breaking through" implies a lack of sense early on in the poem. Then, at the end, the author says she finishes knowing. This is kind of a mysterious line, but by looking at the series of events in her spiral, it makes sense. She eventually came to know that she was unstable and that was okay, but knowing seemed to be a relief in some way. Simply the use of a funeral as the setting for the poem is symbolic of her process being one of the death of a part of herself. She struggled at the beginning to find reason. It was clear in the reading that she had tried, but throughout the pace of the poem, the narrator gives up the facade and comes to accept her fate.