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Essay / The nostalgic nature of death in I Felt a Funeral in My Brain
Norwegian painter Edvard Munch once said that "sickness, madness and death were the angels who attended my cradle and have followed me throughout my life ever since. 'Similar to Munch's thinking, literary critics use mental breakdown and absurdity as a central theme to draw attention to the liberation of the character's grip on reality. Emily Dickinson's writing style fits the idea of being afflicted by irrationality, mental decline, and death itself. In "I Felt a Burial in My Brain", "It Wasn't Death, for I Arose" and "I Felt a Split in My Mind", Emily Dickinson uses hyphens, capitals and figurative language to highlight the psychological effects. of his forced isolation and the poignant nature of death, immortality and love. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Dickinson's tendency to use hyphens and figurative language underscores her desire to withdraw from the world as she is seized and paralyzed by the devastating emotion of irrationality. In Dickinson's "I Felt a Split in My Mind," there are hyphens after almost every line. The hyphens after each line allow for pauses, emphasizing the rhythm of the poem. The main focus of this poem addresses one of Dickinson's phycological problems, considering that the word "cleave" means to divide. As her mind felt like it was falling apart, she tried to “make it fit, seam by seam.” The break in the middle of the line emphasizes that the psychological breakdown she was experiencing was unintentional. She hadn't expected her "brain" to be split, but once it had happened, she tried to put the pieces back together. Dickinson uses the metaphor of a seamstress to express her desire to put the pieces of her mind together. Although she “tried to do it,” her efforts were to no avail. Dickinson, like the seamstress trying to sew her brain back together, is unable to restore herself to a stable mental state. In the second stanza, she longs to connect her thoughts, but they come undone like a thread. It's as if the ball of yarn cannot be used to connect one's thoughts. Along with the metaphor in the second stanza, the hyphens represent pauses between every other word to draw attention to his mental deterioration. Overall, Dickinson "struggled" to reunite her mind and thoughts once they had all left her, as shown in the hyphens and metaphors. In “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain,” the stanzas take the reader into Dickinson’s descent into madness. Dickinson feels like the funeral is happening in her mind. The dashes between the "steps" indicate that those who attended the funeral are pacing in her head and she is unable to get them out. When the funeral began, “A service, like a drum — beating — beat” in his mind and overtook his thoughts. The pauses between verses reveal that Dickinson can only hear the drumming noise that overwhelms her. She compares the noises to a drum because the intensity of the sounds around her seemed as loud as a drum. Throughout the poem, her mental state worsens as she experiences the funeral. The final stanza explains that the metaphorical planks begin to break and as she falls into the endless hole of torture, Dickinson crashes into the world several times. The last stanza ends with a hyphen and the reader is left with only a guess as to what-340.