about "I felt a funeral in my Brain"

[spooky]

hi, i have some questions about this part of the poem:

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here

now English is not my first language, and i don't like reading translated poems, so i interpreted it this way:

by saying

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear

does she mean that she felt like an ear in a world full of bells? the word heavens doesn't have to be taken directly as heaven right?

and

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

what does race mean here? what's the meaning of the whole line? this line is puzzling me most...

thanks =)

[Nick Capozzoli]

hi, i have some questions about this part of the poem:

does she mean that she felt like an ear in a world full of bells? the word heavens doesn't have to be taken directly as heaven right?

and

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

what does race mean here? what's the meaning of the whole line? this line is puzzling me most...

thanks =)

I'm sure native English speakers would find this poem obscure and difficult to understand. Many of Ms. Dickinson's poems are spookily cryptic.

One of her themes seems to be the harsh separation of the individual ("self")from the rest of the physical world ("other"). In this case, "Being" is self and "the heavens" is the other. In other poems, she deals with the harsh separation of the living from the dead (a superb example is "'Twas warm at first like us").

The other makes noise, like a bell, and the self is an ear that hears the bell.



I think that she's saying that the

[Gladys]

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here

The poet speaks:


As a passionate observer at this imagined funeral, I hear 'them lift a Box', the coffin. Yet I am becoming rather more than an observer as pall bearers 'creak across my Soul', my inner self.

I am feeling alienated, I am dying, from the here and now, from 'Space' and 'the Heavens'. My existence has shrunk into 'an Ear', which listens but can no longer participate in life.

'I, and Silence' are two bedfellows disconnected from the human race, from the land of the living. The infinite 'Silence' of death is enveloping me 'Wrecked, solitary, here' on this planet.

Death is an impending and inevitable reality for the poet, as expressed in Hamlet's: 'if it be not now, yet it will come'.


See also My analysis of the entire poem (www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?p=732186#post732186)

[spooky]

thanks for your replies =)

i always thought that this poem is about losing your sanity step by step, and the unbearable terror of being aware of it..so i liked interpreting that line as feeling like an ear in a world full of sounding bells...thinking about the maddening experience...but i'm never sure about Emily's poems, like Nick said her poems are spookily cryptic...so i like reading different explanations & points of view..

Gladys:
'I, and Silence' are two bedfellows disconnected from the human race, from the land of the living. The infinite 'Silence' of death is enveloping me 'Wrecked, solitary, here' on this planet.

I liked this explanation...it fits with my thoughts about this poem...just the "some strange race" part had confused me, but it's better now.. i also think these are the most powerful lines of this poem...

[Gladys]

i always thought that this poem is about losing your sanity step by step, and the unbearable terror of being aware of it.

The 'sanity' interpretation relies on 'And then a Plank in Reason, broke,', which comes so late in the poem that 'inevitable death' seems a better fit.

[spooky]

makes sense =) but the sanity interpretation always made the poem more beautiful/effective(right word?) for me

[mono]

Hi, spooky, welcome to the forum. :)
As Nick Capozzoli mentioned, even native English speakers have difficulty with Dickinson, and, over a century past her death, people even now feel perplexed over her poetry; personally, she fascinates me. Gladys and I discussed this poem you cited on this thread (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44563).
In order to read many of her poems, it seems difficult to analyze them fragment-by-fragment, so reading this one stanza from a multiple-stanza poem may not make a lot of sense without reading the poem in its entirety. One part of understanding Dickinson seems in comprehending her unique punctuation and capitalization of certain words. In this certain stanza, some understanding may come from subtracting some commas; she feels solitary, alone, and, upon her death, casted away from heaven, hell, everything, descending entirely into nothingness. Upon comparing heaven to a bell, and existence an ear, she deprives herself of all sense, including the sense of hearing, in my opinion, explaining why the complete poem ends mid-sentence, secluding herself in nonexistence.

[Gladys]

Upon comparing heaven to a bell, and existence an ear, she deprives herself of all sense, including the sense of hearing, in my opinion, explaining why the complete poem ends mid-sentence, secluding herself in nonexistence.

The emptied poet, accosted now by silence, is ceasing to hear 'the Heavens' tolling her own death!

[Nick Capozzoli]

Mono made some excellent points. Thanks, Mono.

[spooky]

thanks for your comments mono =)

i read the topic you mentioned, it was very enlightening, i should've done more research on this forum before opening this thread :blush:

i now come to think that this poem can be interpreted as a journal(i couldn't find a better word) telling about emily's isolation from society...begins with death of something inside her, Kept treading - treading, Kept beating - beating refers to everything/everyone about her, voices of them becoming a torment for her slowly--but surely, to the point that her mind was going numb, and maybe As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear means that she came to a point at which that everything/everyone every voice around her seems to her nothing but sounding bells, with no meanings, just disturbing sounds....to the point when a Plank in Reason, broke and she finished knowing-then-

[Gladys]

i now come to think that this poem can be interpreted as a journal(i couldn't find a better word) telling about emily's isolation from society ... she came to a point at which that everything/everyone every voice around her seems to her nothing but sounding bells, with no meanings, just disturbing sounds....to the point when a Plank in Reason, broke and she finished knowing-then-

If social isolation, does 'Finished knowing' mean insanity? And what do you make of '- then -'?

[spooky]

no, doesn't have to be insanity then, but i think in the case of social isolation, 'Finished knowing' and then- can be interpreted as the final stages of the isolation...like my surroundings were not more meaningful to me than sounding bells first, then they ceased too, now just blank, complete isolation, and may be insanity with it...or not...doesn't have to be...

[stlukesguild]

Mono... I'm addressing these comments on Dickinson here as the discussion upon her merits might be a bit too far off the OP over on the thread n the "value of fiction".

...she actually never intended her poetry for anyone's eyes, except for the poetry she addressed to others (family, friends) and the few poems she published in her lifetime, which equalled to less than 10 out of the over 1500 written - what we have of hers, we have robbed, hence her alleged "lack of achievement," in your opinion, makes me question the value of her poetry as opposed to others, like Coleridge or Eliot, whose works received great inspiration and acclaim from writing/literary groups, while Dickinson composed her work entirely alone without intention of fame or even the least attention. I would place a high value on her poetry not only for its uniquity, attention to detail by the most acute senses, featuring the deepest introspection, but also as a posthumous work, much like how many place a high value on The Diary of Anne Frank (which the teenager Frank never attempted to publish, especially considering the circumstances)...

Perhaps Dickinson does not deserve a seat in the "class with the first rank of writers," but her introversion, emotional instability, and sensitivity, the woman behind the poet, impeded her possibly successful life as a published poet in her time; instead, we have her rawest emotion, as unbiased and unhindered as a diary, bound in twine, in quantitatively more than most poets write in a lifetime. Personally, I would place the utmost value upon such a beautiful and touching thing.

Mortalterror has made clear on more than one occasion his difficulty with attributing greatness to any artist unable to pull off at least one long or epic work. I question that bias. I would argue that Bach would still be one of the central giants of Western music (if not THE central figure still) even if he had never composed his great oratorios and Mass in B. Rembrandt, to my mind, stands second only to Michelangelo in spite of the fact that he rarely ever painted anything that might be considered "large" in scale... surely nothing approaching the epic scale attained by Michelangelo, Rubens, Raphael, and numerous others. By the same token, Baudelaire rarely exceeds the length of a single page, and yet he is undoubtedly the greatest poet of France...although one may certainly argue that the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal read as a single great unified work. But can we not argue the same of Dickinson?

"Beautiful" and "touching"? At times... yes. But to a great extent such terms greatly undermine and underestimate this poet. Milton can be "beautiful" and "touching"... but he is so much more. So is Dickinson. Her intention as a poet is irrelevant to me (although I will note that she did show a good deal of he poetic output to Thomas Wentworth Higginson among others). Franz Kafka demanded that the majority of his papers be burnt (as did Dickinson) yet I would not second guess him as a writer. A great many "artists" working in any field would never have considered themselves "artists" or "writers" in the modern sense... but that does not make them any less so. Fernando Pessoa's reputation continues to grow as more and more of his writings locked away in an old trunk and found after his death are deciphered and translated. The fact that Dickinson may never have intended a public audience in the manner that a recognized and published figure like Tennyson or Wordsworth did only increases my admiration for a poet that clearly wrote for reasons beyond any thoughts of recognition or wealth.

What I recall from my first real experience with Dickinson, was my initial sense of "shock and awe". My high school teachers had presented her as some sort of overly sentimental New England dowager... the famous "woman in white". I remember getting the impression of a prudish Puritan spinster, forever dressed up like some Victorian doll... locked in her room... writing delicate verses that she bound in pink ribbon. I college, she was "rehabilitated" as "Saint Emily," the holy icon of feminists and lesbians everywhere (along with Virginia Woolf). My initial serious reading of her work shattered all of these illusions. It became quite clear that Dickinson far surpassed either of these stereotypes.

Her verse is taut... austere... dense... and gem-like, and yet it often reveals vast hidden depths of meaning upon closer inspection. Her vocabulary (which rarely exceeds 2 or 3 syllable words) and her verse forms are brilliantly compressed... and yet I am struck again and again by the sudden unexpected image or metaphor. Her "hide and seek" syntax, sudden shifts in rhyme, and those ever present pauses and "eccentric" capitalization (similar to Blake?) seem ever laden with significance. In fact, I always get the feeling that every poem is something of a riddle in need of a solution, and every word means more than is first revealed. Roger Shattuck offers just such an insightful word for word analysis of one of Dickinson's shorter poems, "The Charm" (no. 421) in his book, "Forbidden Knowledge". I highly recommend it for anyone reading her work.

Critic Harold Bloom, indeed goes so far as to declare Dickinson as the most cognitively original poet in Western Literature outside of William Blake (and Dante). I wouldn't suggest that I think myself capable of agreeing or disagreeing with Bloom... although I must state that as a great lover of the cognitive challenges of Blake and Dante that is some high praise, indeed. I do agree, however, that she is an incredibly original poet, second to no one among American poets... surely every bit equal to Whitman. Her work may be partially credited to a brilliant fusion of a variety of diverse poetic inspirations: Milton's sonnet's, the poems of John Donne, Emerson, New England's hymns, nursery rhymes, puns and riddles... but then, it is always made uniquely her own. A poet friend of mine has described her poems as "stern little boxes", it reminds me of the fact that the artist I most think of in connection with Dickinson, is Joseph Cornell, who was an equally innovative, self-taught original... a great American artist most known for his brilliantly structured boxes.

[stlukesguild]

Returning to the initial posting, I agree that the poem suggests something of a descent into madness:

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--

In the stanza in question I agree that she reaches the point of a loss of reason as "all the heavens were a bell, And Being but and ear..." suggests that to her mind everywhere is noise... ringing... and existence itself (as suggested by the capitalized "Being") is an ear. Yet the poet, like silence, is an outsider... foreign to all this existence. I especially love the ambiguity of the ending as her reason breaks she finishes knowing...?

[Gladys]

Her verse is taut... austere... dense... and gem-like, and yet it often reveals vast hidden depths of meaning upon closer inspection.

I am attracted to Emily Dickenson by a guileless intensity, present also in Keats.


Returning to the initial posting, I agree that the poem suggests something of a descent into madness ... I especially love the ambiguity of the ending as her reason breaks she finishes knowing...?

Is hers a 'descent into madness', or insensibility in the final phase of dying, in which case '--then--' alludes to a possible afterlife? Since the poem is saturated with images of death and burial, aren’t faint suggestions of ‘social isolation’ and 'madness' better explained by the poet's appreciation of the annihilation inherent in dying?

[stlukesguild]

Is hers a 'descent into madness', or insensibility in the final phase of dying, in which case '--then--' alludes to a possible afterlife? Since the poem is saturated with images of death and burial, aren’t faint suggestions of ‘social isolation’ and 'madness' better explained by the poet's appreciation of the annihilation inherent in dying?

Yes... another possibility. Or perhaps hers is even a suggestion of sensations after death itself... the funeral observed as the recently departed?

[Nick Capozzoli]

Returning to the initial posting, I agree that the poem suggests something of a descent into madness:

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--



Thanks for citing the whole poem. I wanted to point out the way that ED describes the sense of NUMBNESS in this poem, which is about death. ED wrote many poems that deal with death, and especially about her perception of the sharp and sudden distinction between the living and the dead. "'Twas warm at first like us" and "The difference between dispair" are fine examples of her efforts to describe this inscrutable and profound distinction.

WC Williams wrote a great poem on the same topic. Although WCW's diction is quite different from ED's, I think that he was expressing exactly the same experience of the utter inscrutability of death. WCW's dead journalist is perceived at the transition between life and death...he even has a sort of frozen facial expression of "wonder" as if he had glimpsed the great beyond that he could not tell us about. At the moment of death something profound was revealed to the dead person, who suddenly becomes numb, frozen, and incapable of further expression. This is so Dickinsonian.

To a Dead Journalist

Behind that white brow
now the mind simply sleeps--
the eyes, closed, the
lips, the mouth

the chin, no longer useful,
the prow of the nose.
But rumors of the news,
unrealizable,

cling still among those
silent, butted features, a
sort of wonder at
this scoop

come now, too late:
beneath the lucid ripples
to have found so monstrous
an obscurity.

[Drkshadow03]

Her verse is taut... austere... dense... and gem-like, and yet it often reveals vast hidden depths of meaning upon closer inspection. Her vocabulary (which rarely exceeds 2 or 3 syllable words) and her verse forms are brilliantly compressed... and yet I am struck again and again by the sudden unexpected image or metaphor. Her "hide and seek" syntax, sudden shifts in rhyme, and those ever present pauses and "eccentric" capitalization (similar to Blake?) seem ever laden with significance. In fact, I always get the feeling that every poem is something of a riddle in need of a solution, and every word means more than is first revealed. Roger Shattuck offers just such an insightful word for word analysis of one of Dickinson's shorter poems, "The Charm" (no. 421) in his book, "Forbidden Knowledge". I highly recommend it for anyone reading her work.


Man, you really do read literature like a visual artist! You description almost makes it sound like you're describing a painting rather than a poem. That's not a bad thing necessarily. Just stood out to me when reading your response.

[Gladys]

beneath the lucid ripples
to have found so monstrous
an obscurity.

Does this mean: the ultimate news scoop of a dying journalist, concerning the nature of death, hides under his serene but lifeless countenance - an inhuman travesty?

[Drkshadow03]

The poem in this form can really be read two ways; it is either a poem about a descent into madness or is a poem describing death.

The extended metaphor of a funeral for the speaker's brain is literally a funeral being held for the death of her mind. The first stanza with its treading mourners represents thoughts going back and forth in anticipation and realization that she is going crazy, hence why they are mourning (for the impending loss of the speaker's sanity), while the treading captures metaphorically the racing of thoughts.

Stanza 2's drums are a headache that grows worse and worse, and leads to her brain growing numb like anestesia being injected. She is losing the sensations of her mind.

Stanza 3, the mourner are departing with the funeral box that is the last vestiges of her mind. They creak across her soul, which gives a sensation that they are trying to escape in secret and robbing her of something important. Boots of lead makes the impending loss of her reason sound like a heavy burden, weighing her down. Immediately the world around her rings out with sound, almost chaotically, with no more sense or reason or a functioning mind to make sense of all the noise.

Stanza 4 continues the ending of Stanza 3. All existence has been transformed to an "ear." The ringing bell of heaven both symbolizes church bells ringing for the death of her sanity and the random noises and sounds of the world around her. She can no longer make heads or tails of reality, it exists completely in the forms of sensations, intense sounds, without a mind to bring it order. While she is left alone with silence inside her mind because at this point her mind is for the most part gone, with only a little bit left; she no longer has racing thoughts because her brain has separated from the world.

However, Stanza 5 comes and it turns out she did have a little bit of reason left. The plank of reason breaks and she plunges deeper and deeper into insanity, allowing her to view the world anew multiple times through the eyes of madness. Dickinson twists our notions about insanity with her last line. Only through madness can we truly know the world as it is. However, since you're mad there is no way you can communicate this knowledge to others, hence the ambiguity of the last line; she knows all about the metaphysics of the world thanks to her madness plunging into different worlds of perspective, but since she is mad there is no way to communicate this information intelligibly to others who aren't mad.

The other reading takes the death literally. When we die our brain dies; when our brain dies we die. She is the moment before death where you know you're about to die (stanzas 1-2), the actual moment of death (Stanza 3-4), and then the entering of heaven or hell or whatever awaits us after death (stanza 5), as all our reason that says such things cannot exist disappear, and we plunged down into whatever awaits us, finally knowing, leaving the ambiguity of what comes next.

Some editions cut out the last (fifth) stanza of the poem. The poem ends with the fourth stanza:

"As all then heavens were a bell,/And Being but an ear,/And I and silence some strange race,/Wrecked, solitary, here."

This changes the reading slightly through its different emphasis. The silence of the ending is being emphasized rather than the breaking of the last plank of reason and the descent into worlds of madness and the afterlife (as this last part is absent from this version of the poem). This creates a third possible reading for the poem. In this version the poem is about the individuals separation from the outside world. The funeral being held is for her social persona. The person who engages with society is dead, divorced from the outside world, leaving only the solitary hermit with silence for company. It is not a literal death or a death of the mind into a state of insanity, but rather a chosen separation from the things of the outside world. In a way, we might also say all three poems are about transformation, moving from one state of existence to another (sanity to insanity, life to death, social to recluse).


The second

[Gladys]

The extended metaphor of a funeral for the speaker's brain is literally a funeral being held for the death of her mind.

Thanks for an enlightening recount of three alternative readings. The 'madness' reading troubles me.


Stanza 1 - 'That sense was breaking through' implies coherence rather than madness in the poet.

Stanza 3 - 'And then I heard them lift a box' is an action 'in the brain' of poet, an action that affects her 'eternal' soul rather than her mind, the receptacle of madness.

Stanza 5 - 'And then a plank in reason, broke' suggests that, as senses failed her, the poet's reason was the last to collapse: she remains sane until a plank supporting reason breaks. If 'And finished knowing--then--' implies 'Only through madness can we truly know the world as it is', the poet’s '--then--' is almost meaningless.

[Drkshadow03]

Thanks for an enlightening recount of three alternative readings. The 'madness' reading troubles me.


Stanza 1 - 'That sense was breaking through' implies coherence rather than madness in the poet.

Stanza 3 - 'And then I heard them lift a box' is an action 'in the brain' of poet, an action that affects her 'eternal' soul rather than her mind, the receptacle of madness.

Stanza 5 - 'And then a plank in reason, broke' suggests that, as senses failed her, the poet's reason was the last to collapse: she remains sane until a plank supporting reason breaks. If 'And finished knowing--then--' implies 'Only through madness can we truly know the world as it is', the poet’s '--then--' is almost meaningless.

I think the last line in the first stanza is the most problematic for the "madness" reading. We might also read the poem as describing the process of having an epiphany about the world.

The funeral in her brain being the end of one state of conscious and way of thinking about the world. The mourner treading still being racing thoughts, but now the racing thoughts seem on the verge of breaking through with a new understanding, new sense. Stanza 3 and 4 shows her new enlightened sense of the world where the heavens literally ring and existence is experienced through hearing, but then in Stanza 5 the reasoning behind this new epiphany, this ultimate understanding, breaks and she returns to the real world, no longer sure what she knows; she had an almost epiphany and then lost it. Stanza 2 doesn't fit in as well in this reading.

[mono]

Mono... I'm addressing these comments on Dickinson here as the discussion upon her merits might be a bit too far off the OP over on the thread n the "value of fiction".
I appreciate your thoughts and enjoyed reading them. Thanks, stlukesguild. ;)

Great stanza-by-stanza interpretations, Drkshadow, and, as Gladys mentioned, very noble of you to take multiple stances on the same poem. Dickinson seems to have that effect upon me, too; I still retain my interpretation upon this same poem on another thread, which I cited on the previous page of this thread, but I have read older posts of mine on this forum, analyzing Dickinson's poetry, and end up disagreeing with myself, wondering "what was I thinking then?" Her metaphors, unique language use, odd punctuation, and occasional vagueness really makes reading her poetry an experience worth encountering - each encounter seems to have its own individual mood to it that overwhelms one easily; on many occasions, I have even read her poetry, sat down to meditate upon it, then snapped out of an almost trance-like state, refinding myself several minutes later, almost as if I had woken up from a dream in a different place from minutes previous. Unlike many authors, she has that very intimate ability with her individual readers, and, from time to time, as I mentioned in the post that stlukesguild quoted, I wonder if she would have had the same effect upon her contemporaries, had she shared some of her poetry.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Does this mean: the ultimate news scoop of a dying journalist, concerning the nature of death, hides under his serene but lifeless countenance - an inhuman travesty?

Yes, but it means so much more. It is really an apalling image. It means that the Journalist, at the moment he died, saw or otherwise experienced something quite startling...one imagines that it was an understanding of death, what it means to die, an ultimate realization. But at the precise moment of understanding, he died and left his body as a corpse, and all we, who remain alive can do is try to decipher what he felt at that ultimate moment, and what he felt is recorded in his facial expression. frozen at the moment of dealth. To A Dead Journalist is a masterful poem that bears comparison to ED's poems on the same subject.

[Thomas Lucero]

I think Dickinson is describing someone else's funeral, but she does it so vividly that I feel she is touching death, and that she is talking about her own non-existence. On reading verse 5:

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--

I am reading not one world of death, but a multitude, and it sure doesn't feel like anything I would describe as heaven. I think that's the point.

[MANICHAEAN]

Check the "Beyond Assumptions" website.
Its reviewed there by Mr X, The Scarlet Pimpernell of this Forum.

[Nick Capozzoli]

I think Dickinson is describing someone else's funeral, but she does it so vividly that I feel she is touching death, and that she is talking about her own non-existence. On reading verse 5:

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--

I am reading not one world of death, but a multitude, and it sure doesn't feel like anything I would describe as heaven. I think that's the point.

I think you make an astute point. ED describes something outside herself. That's what brains do...they experience an outside world via sensations felt inside the perceiver's brain...thus, "I felt a funeral in my brain." Here the indefinite article a and the preposition in are critical operative words that establish the external object/internal subject split.

But I don't think she is talking about her own non-existence. She's talking about her internal existence in relation to experience of existence outside of herself. Reason is the structure of her experiential being; it is they way her brain makes sense of her experience of the world. It's a kind of scaffold she stands on. This poem apparently describes a failure of this scaffolding. It collapses and she falls down, passing through many levels of experience, none of which stop her fall. I think that what this poem is really about is the inability of a conscious being to connect with the world outside, at least while the being is conscious. As long as the being is conscious, there is a disconnect between experience and the world, resulting in a kind of constant experiential "slippage" such as that described by her fall after the plank in reason broke. The only time connection is possible is in death, when the conscious being losses consciousness and then becomes a part of the "other," or the outside world. At that pont, however, the now dead being has no "internal" existence, and nothing to say. It becomes a part of "the outside world, inamimate and ultimately inscrutable, like a rock or a marble bust "that cannot see.":idea:

Nick

[Nick Capozzoli]

I want to say that there is a great short poem by Philip Pain, an early American poet about whom little is known. It is cited by Yvor Winters, and goes as follows:

Scarce do I pass a day, but that I hear
Some one or other's dead, and to my ear
Me thinks it is no news: but Oh! did I
Think deeply on it, what it is to dye,
My pulses all would beat, I should not be
Drowned in this Deluge of Security.

This seems to me to be an expression of something
similar to what ED describes in her poem. The reaction
of both poets is one of panic, and I use the term in
its original etymological sense. Pain describes quickening
pulse and ED describes a sense of falling throgh broken
planks of reason.

Nick

[Gladys]

The reaction
of both poets is one of panic, and I use the term in
its original etymological sense

The mysterious sounds of the Greek God Pan caused contagious, groundless fear in herds and crowds, or in people in lonely spots. While Philip Pain's poem suggests the panic in the face of death, Emily Dickinson poem has more the flavour of existential angst regarding life.

[Nick Capozzoli]

The mysterious sounds of the Greek God Pan caused contagious, groundless fear in herds and crowds, or in people in lonely spots. While Philip Pain's poem suggests the panic in the face of death, Emily Dickinson poem has more the flavour of existential angst regarding life.

I view them both as a panic reaction, with this difference: PP's poem is an agitated panic, while ED's expresses a numb panic.