Emily Dickinson's "I felt a funeral, in my Brain," was written in 1862. On the surface, it deals with death and madness. It traces the speaker's decent into madness. It is a terrifying poem for both the speaker and the reader. The speaker experiences the loss of self in the chaos of the unconscious. The reader experiences the speaker's descending madness and the horror most of people feel about going crazy.
             Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. This renown 19th century poet wrote nearly 1,800 poems and only 12 were published during her lifetime. Unusually, most of the poetry she wrote was about death. She very rarely left her house and visitors were scarce. Her poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want. Her work was heavily influenced by poets of the seventeenth-century, as well as her Puritan upbringing and the Book of Revelation. Dickinson was a brilliant woman that wrote many poems. Unfortunately, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. Emily Dickinson's "I felt a funeral, in my Brain," is best understood by knowing about her life and the social situations of the time this poem was composed.
             First, this poem is best understood by knowing some important things about her life that include her Puritan upbringing, and her "religious skepticism" (Young 72). The town in which Emily Dickinson lived was very attached to its Puritan traditions. Though her stern father did not join the church until rather late in life, he was from "the old school Puritanism." From all sides she felt a pressure to experience "conversion." However, Emily could not experience a personal conversion. Emily's feeling towards religion and the unknown fueled her spiritual and artistic growth (McIntosh). The existence of the unknown "provoked Dickinson's imagination; indeed, an openness to
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