Extract

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / And Mourners to and fro

Mourners tread back and forth, a service drones like a drum, and the mind that perceives all this is also the coffin being lowered. Emily Dickinson composed this poem around 1861 but it was not published in her lifetime, and its few stanzas enact a dissolution so precise it reads like clinical phenomenology rendered in hymn meter. The funeral is metaphor and yet it is not only metaphor: something is genuinely dying inside the speaker, some capacity for coherence, and the poem traces that collapse with the steady ritual of a burial. Each stanza drops deeper. A plank in reason breaks. Then silence, then a fall through worlds. Dickinson gave psychic catastrophe the structure of ceremony, and the ceremony does not console.