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I felt a funeral in my brain

Emily Dickinson

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, 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.

Of note

When the poem was first printed in 1896, editor Mabel Loomis Todd dropped its final stanza, the one where "a Plank in Reason" breaks. For more than half a century, readers knew a version that ended with the speaker "Wrecked, solitary, here."

FREE AND OPEN: Hello Doggo’s music, recordings and artwork: CC0 1.0, credit optional. The source poem has its own rights status: Poem is public domain.

TEXT PROVENANCE · First published 1896 in Poems by Emily Dickinson: Third Series · Text from Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete, a Project Gutenberg compilation of the 1890, 1891, and 1896 series.

Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete

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