I Felt a Funeral in my Brain

I Felt a Funeral in my Brain
by Emily Dickinson

Found at http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/I_Felt_AFuneral.htm

I have never read to much of Emily Dickinson's work and was therefore quite stunned to find so many of her poems realted to or dealing with death. I truly enjoyed how this poem used death or a funeral as a metaphor to represent how the speaker feels a part of her is dying. It seems to me that the speaker is at a loss of control, or has no control over her conscience. In other words, it seems like the speaker can't make sense of herself due to the chaos. In a sense this is an exact opposite of funerals which are very structured and are controlled. Furthermore, in this poem the very first line states that the speaker is "feeling a funeral in her brain." Using the idea of a metaphor, I began to think that since a funeral is in a sense, a passage from one state to another, the idea of the speaker feeling a funeral eludes to the idea that she is feeling the passage from comprehension and understanding to another state of chaos and misunderstanding.
Even the structure and grammar adds to the change in state within this poem. In the beginning, the use of her punctuations are quite orderly and structured. However, as the speaker begins her descent into madness, the use of punctuations begins to get chaotic. Commas and dashes are used much more frequently creating a sense of chaos just by looking at it on the page, as well as, reading it aloud.