The Darkness of Emily Dickinson

It’s October, and pumpkin spice latte is in the air. So is a renewed popular interest in one of America’s greatest poets, Emily Dickinson. And because she enjoyed a bit of the macabre in her work, let’s celebrate her this spooky month.

We associate Edgar Allan Poe with anything simultaneously poetic and macabre, with obvious good reason. And Dickinson was undoubtedly influenced by Poe. Everyone read him, after all. And like him, Dickinson often explored darkness in her writing. A sample:

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me

She penned some 1,800 poems, yet fewer than a dozen saw publication during her life. A private person, she wasn’t particularly interested in drawing attention to herself or her talent.
But my goodness, what a talent! Decades later, the literary community recognized that much of her work was ahead of its time, a forerunner of Modernism.
Let’s zero in on the dark, layered masterpiece that is “I Felt a Funeral, In My Brain,” published posthumously in 1896:
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—

Many critics have decided this poem is a description of descent into madness. There is no literal death in the poem, they argue. Rather, it deals with the loss of one’s sanity and rational thought. The image of the funeral in her brain, and the mind going numb, and the plank of reason breaking, support that interpretation. Furthermore, Dickinson capitalizes “Brain,” “Sense,” “Mind,” “Being,” and “Reason,” revealing that she wants us to focus on those words and personify them.
That’s a fine analysis, but those critics may simply be uncomfortable with anything that smacks of horror or the fantastic. Dickinson knew exactly what she was doing, and I believe there’s more going on here.

What if we read this poem as a prescient vision of the narrator’s own funeral?

What if we take a more literal view? What if the narrator actually is buried alive? After all, she is feeling her own funeral and can’t do a damned thing about it. She cannot see a thing, and can only hear the sounds of the funeral, the leaden sound of boots, the creak of her coffin. That in itself might cause of the breaking of the plank of reason. Could anything be more terrifying? Is she trapped in an unresponsive body?

Maybe the body has shed its life, yet not its consciousness.

Masterful stuff. Yet the coup de grace comes in the final line:

And Finished knowing—then—

That open-ended finish sticks with you and haunts you. Then what? Is madness complete? Is the coffin forever buried? You need to know but are left hanging. We see this done in 20th- and 21st century fiction. So even if you never read poetry, at least tip your hat to the remarkable vision and voice of Emily Dickinson.
And for some Halloween Bonus Emily, enjoy “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.”