Stephen Greene
English 48B
March 15, 2011
Journal #27, Emily Dickinson
"340 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 Bok / And creak across my Soul / With those same Boots of Lead, again, / 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-"(Emily Dickinson, 84)
"Dickinson attended primary school in a two-story building on Pleasant Street.[12] Her education was "ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl".[13] Her father wanted his children well-educated and he followed their progress even while away on business. When Emily was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to "keep school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned".[14] While Emily consistently described her father in a warm manner, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold and aloof. In a letter to a confidante, Emily wrote she "always ran Home to Awe [Austin] when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none"("Emily Dickinson, Wikipedia).This poem particularly fascinates me. I first read it as from an auto-biographical voice of someone being driven slowly to insanity through too much knowledge and too much social stimulation. The last lines lead me to believe that it has something to do with a surplus of knowledge, although perhaps sarcastically. The last line, 'And Finished knowing- then' seems to imply this idea of the culmination of the pursuit if knowing and the arrival at the end of the path to insanity as occurring simultaneously. I almost read it as a sarcastic, fictional, and vaguely darkly humorous plotting of her own path. She knows that she is not going crazy, but perhaps feels it momentarily from intruding visitors in her room, from some of society's formalities, and from solitude. I can see Dickinson thinking up this almost silly idea of herself pursuing endless knowledge, but constantly being disrupted, distracted, etc. Then, this path leads her fictional self down a path to insanity just as she reaches the end of knowledge and has finished. She writes a poem that tells this story, but it does more. It is written in a way that shows the reader rather than tells. She does not talk directly of the person's actions or even of reality. She does not describe the subject of her poem in third person, nor give any hint to what they look like from an external point of view. She instead, speaks first person, limits details in order to make it almost universally applicable to the individual, and speaks only of the person's perceived reality and how these things slowly make them crazy.
20/20
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