"Success is counted sweetest"

This poems message, carried forth in a few different metaphors, is that those who succeed never truly
appreciate itit is only those who fail, or who lack something, that can truly appreciate how
wonderful it would be if they did succeed. The dilemma presented by this poem is that it is not just
those who strive for longer before succeeding that can appreciate it more, it is only those who neer
succeed who can count it sweetest to succeed. This means, then, that no one ever truly appreciates
success to its full desert, because those who could, once offered the chance, lose the ability to.
The next metaphor changes the scope of the poem slightly; it is no longer just about success, but about
want and desire, too. Here, for someone To comprehend a nectar, that is, to truly understand all the
wonderful aspects of nectar, and to be satisfied by it, not just to scarf it down, Requires sorest need.
That is, only the starving can truly appreciate food. Again, we have the dilemma that as soon as one
has their first bite, they are no longer starving, and they quickly lose their ability to appreciate it.
The final two stanzas elucidate one last, more extended, metaphor. Here Dickinson has taken us to a
battlefield, and she compares the perspectives of the winning and losing sides. Not only can the
soldiers in the winning army not feel the same appreciation of victory as the losing soldiers, but they
cannot even truly understand what it is. Those soldiers left defeated and dying on the battlefield,
however, can, as they must listen to the other sides celebrations of their victory.
Analysis
Fame, or success, and their lackfailureoften occurs as a theme in Dickinsons poetry. Ironically,
this poem, extolling the virtues of failure, was one of her very few poems to be published (although
after heavy editorializing). Yet while this poems publication may complicate the issue, it can still be
read as being largely about Dickinsons own failure to publish her poetry, even though she removes
the poem and its failures from herself by using only third-person narration and an distant, unemotional
tone.
Although during her lifetime her poems were not published, there was something to be gained in this
ostensible failure, and that is what she explores in this poem. Beyond just liking paradoxes, Dickinson
regularly sees pain as having the positive side of adding to ones experience, and this is another
example of that paradox. Not only can a successfully published poet not understand the true joy of
that publication, as the winning soldier cannot, but they also lose their ability to empathize with
failure generally, as the victorious soldier strides off to loud fanfare, completely ignoring the dead and
dying on the other side of the battle field. Nor can they see the true beauty of success, and thus, they
lose part of their emotional vocabulary for their poems. In this way the experience of success may
actually lead to less truly successful poemsthey may be published, but they are not as profound, or
so Dickinson seems to believe.
This can be read as a reason that Dickinson did not try harder to get her poems published, although it
is more likely that had to do with her repeated failures to do so, and the agonizing changes editors
made, even when her poems were accepted. This poem, then, is more of a portrait of the frustrating
ironies of life, rather than a single extended metaphor for the good side of her failure to publish, for
the examples in the poem show that true happiness cannot be ultimately available, if one cannot
appreciate success unless one does not have it.
Dickinson is careful to avoid directly discussing the successes or failures of publication, just as she is
careful to keep herself out of the poem as a character or even a visible speaker. The opening two lines
deal with success directly, followed by two metaphors; starvation and loss in battle. Of these, the
battle metaphor gets by far the majority of the lines, which seems to emphasize the fact that success
often requires the failure of another.




Hope is the thing with feathers...
Summary
The speaker describes hope as a bird (the thing with feathers) that perches in the soul. There, it
sings wordlessly and without pause. The song of hope sounds sweetest in the Gale, and it would
require a terrifying storm to ever abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm. The speaker says
that she has heard the bird of hope in the chillest land / And on the strangest Sea, but never, no
matter how extreme the conditions, did it ever ask for a single crumb from her.
Form
Like almost all of Dickinsons poems, Hope is the thing with feathers... takes the form of an
iambic trimeter that often expands to include a fourth stress at the end of the line (as in And sings the
tune without the words). Like almost all of her poems, it modifies and breaks up the rhythmic flow
with long dashes indicating breaks and pauses (And never stopsat all). The stanzas, as in most
of Dickinsons lyrics, rhyme loosely in an ABCB scheme, though in this poem there are some
incidental carryover rhymes: words in line three of the first stanza rhymes with heard and Bird
in the second; Extremity rhymes with Sea and Me in the third stanza, thus, technically
conforming to an ABBB rhyme scheme.
Commentary
This simple, metaphorical description of hope as a bird singing in the soul is another example of
Dickinsons homiletic style, derived from Psalms and religious hymns. Dickinson introduces her
metaphor in the first two lines (Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul),
then develops it throughout the poem by telling what the bird does (sing), how it reacts to hardship (it
is unabashed in the storm), where it can be found (everywhere, from chillest land to strangest
Sea), and what it asks for itself (nothing, not even a single crumb). Though written after Success is
counted sweetest, this is still an early poem for Dickinson, and neither her language nor her themes
here are as complicated and explosive as they would become in her more mature work from the mid-
1860s. Still, we find a few of the verbal shocks that so characterize Dickinsons mature style: the use
of abash, for instance, to describe the storms potential effect on the bird, wrenches the reader back
to the reality behind the pretty metaphor; while a singing bird cannot exactly be abashed, the word
describes the effect of the stormor a more general hardshipupon the speakers hopes.



"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"

In Emily Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" the speaker tells of the loss of her mind. It is
an allegorical description of her feeling that the normal function of her mind had ended, just as
the normal function of a person happens when they die. The "funeral in her brain" is a metaphor
for the death of the mind. According to Paul deMann, "Thus the allegory of the funeral attempts
to exteriorize and give a temporal structure to what is in fact interior and simultaneous."
By utilizing the most common of events, the speaker alienates herself from her feelings and can
freely express her thoughts without addressing that these thoughts are her own torments of the
mind. It allows her the freedom to present what tortures her most, without granting us
permission to enter into the privacy of her own feelings.
This makes sense in that the poem begins with her "feeling" the funeral, then describing, not
"feeling" throughout the narrative of the funeral, until the middle of the second to last stanza,
when she returns to her own reaction of the event, and informs us that it is about what is
happening to her inside of herself, and we are reminded that it is an allegorical representation of
her mental state and not the story of an actual funeral.
Cynthia Griffin Wolf tells us that "Without the systematic, articulated ceremony of the funeral
rites, a reader might have no idea what the speaker was describing, and the poem would lack
coherence and unity; without the steady distortion of the terms by which self is defined, the
reader could not apprehend the full experiential anguish of the process."
By dramatizing what occurred with her self through this allegory, she has given it a clarity that a
mere straightforward description of the decent into madness could not. The speaker uses familiar
words and a familiar situation (a funeral) to dramatize the loss of her mind so that it is an
explanation that can be understood by those who have not experienced it. She equates it to this
common situation that anyone can relate to. In the end, she is able to capitalize on this use of
allegory in her description of the breaking of the plank that holds her coffin- a horrifying thought
to anyone, as a means of dramatizing the horror of her personal descent.
The events are related in the past tense, to offer an explanation of what has happened to the
speaker. A nostalgic retrospective, terrifying in its loneliness, and her isolation from others, yet
represented without a feeling of terror. More accurately related with a sense of resignation for
what she had lost, whether her life of her mind. Perhaps her choice is to show that there was a
deterioration that led to her loss of herself, presenting it as a loss of a life: a funeral. In a way it
was the loss of a person, or a "life" in the metaphorical sense. And by describing the funeral as if
it were her own, the vision of her in her coffin, alone, describing what it was like, knowing full
well that this is something that most people shudder to think of- the view from their own coffin.
This further compounds the sense of her loneliness and isolation.
Further illustration the separation from her self that she feels is that she presents the events of
the funeral, not the feelings. While she "felt a Funeral, in my Brain," she did not "attend" a
funeral, nor did she share how she felt at the funeral, but rather she gave the detail of the event.
Throughout the poem she portrays a scene that involves a chain of events, sharing them with the
reader is rather in a matter of fact manner.
Additionally, no one interacts with anyone else at the funeral. No individual is ever mentioned,
no sentence is ever uttered, and no mourning attire is described. The mourners are faceless and
devoid of feeling. They are just beings, and they are just there, unfeeling.
Once striking sense is that although the poem begins with the "feeling" of a funeral in her brain,
there is no feeling on the part of the mourners. There are no sounds of sadness, no "muffled
cries" no sobbing, no wailing, not even words from a service. There is no eulogy, no discussion of
the person who was lost. It is as though she did not even exist. If she is indeed represented as the
person who has died, she feels nothing from the mourners, or even the person officiating at the
service. She is totally alone. The illustration is one of total isolation of the speaker, a distancing
from the real world, and more importantly, from any sort of feelings by people about her.
The meter of the poem is in the classic ballad meter style of Dickinson, and gives the poem a
somber tone. It adds to the message of the poem with it rhythmic tone similar to that of a funeral
dirge. Here the ABDB rhyme scheme carries us through the poem until the use of slant rhyme
wakes us up in the last stanza:
And I dropped down, and down-
And hit a World at every plunge,
And Finished knowing-then- (20)
Which causes us to notice that something of great importance has happened. However
throughout the poem the rhyme scheme gives it a certain cadence which imitates the sound of
marching, a sound that just drones on throughout the poem, and is addressed in the second
stanza and discusses the impact of the sound on the speaker and how it accelerates her loss of
self. The rhyme is defiantly used to set a tone for the poem and generate a certain feeling, putting
us right there at the funeral. By using slant rhyme instead of the exact rhyme for the final
paragraph she juxtaposes the ordinary cadence of the poem and startles us to make us
understand that something extraordinary has happened.
She felt a Funeral in her Brain, and both were capitalized, alerting us to the thought that both the
funeral and her brain are equally important, and tied to each other. In the following line, the
Mourners are awarded equal importance, and as the speaker will go on to describe, they
contributed to the "death" of her brain in their unrelenting assault on her through the use of
repetition.
Kept treading-treading-till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through- (4)
The line, as well as the thought, does not end there with a period, but with a dash, because the
thought goes on to describe the mourners contribution to her descent into madness, to her loss of
herself. They are nameless, faceless, much as she feels that she is herself. There are no
individuals, only the group. No one steps up to put a rose on her coffin- she is truly and entirely
alone. Throughout the poem there are no individuals, and the unity of the group is further
illustrated later in the poem where they are indeed described as being of a different race than she
is.
The speaker voices her irritation with those around her and their roll in her "death"
Kept treading-treading-till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through- (4)
She seems to have had a rising irritation with people throughout the course of the poem. The
image is one of being surrounded by people but never interacting with them, either in feeling or
in action, except when they perpetrate unpleasant actions that hurt her to the core. This presents
an additional statement on the lack of feeling of people as they contribute to her demise,
unknowing and unfeeling of what they are doing as the follow the conventional behavior of her
time: to come to mourn because it is what is done.
The theme of the poem is twofold- it describes a funeral and all that make it a very traditional,
accepted event. The lines tend to drone on which gives it the tone of a funeral procession. Initially
the least important thing seems to be the person who has died- the formality of the process is
what matters. It has a somber tone with an underlying feeling of desperation of one who is
trapped emotionally and figuratively and cannot escape, cannot find any help. It has a solitary
feeling of isolation on all levels, both physical and emotional.
The structure in which the events are portrayed has a beginning: the arrival of the mourners, a
middle: they are then seated for the funeral service and the ringing of the bells, and the end: the
burial at the cemetery. This shows a metaphorical relationship in more detail, creating a parallel
to let us know that this process of a progressive loss of her mind just as natural as she views the
natural progression of life into death. This illustrates that it was, indeed a process, not a
cataclysmic moment when everything changed.
The choice of syntax in this poem is used to underline the sense of motion and alliteration is used
through use of the repetition of the same words:
treading and treading (3)
beating, beating (7)
and dropped down, down (18)

This is used to create a rhythm thorough repetition used for an auditory imagery to create the
feeling of a march that just drones on and on, like the funeral dirge which has become her
existence. All three stress negative actions and have serious consequences, strengthening the
somber tone of the poem. They are also used to drive home the major points in the loss of her
mind, and the unceasing spiral toward insanity. There is kinesthesia in the descriptions of "Kept
treading-treading-till it seemed" (3) as well as in "Kept beating-beating-till I thought" (7) and
"And I dropped down, and down-(18), with each double use of the word appealing to the
kinesthetic sense of motion, so that we could almost feel the rhythm of the action.
With the description that they dramatized that they (people, or actually everyone in her earthly
world) just kept pounding at her until it broke her.
Kept treading-treading till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through- (4)
Further, the incessant pounding at her in
Kept beating-beating-till I thought
My Mind was going numb - ! (8)

This chips away at her mind, until she can endure no more and it goes numb. The word beating is
also used as homonym, being used as the verb beating in that it is not only the sound of the
beating of a drum, but the beating down of a person. The "beating" goes on until she can endure
no more and she "goes numb." It implies the psychological torture of her interaction with people
and how it lost any meaning and just droned on an on in her mind, tormenting her in its absence
of actual meaning. It was the psychological beating and the metaphor of beating like a drum, as
well as the abuse that it felt like.
The use of the sound of the "Bell" is auditory imagery, reminiscent of the sadness when the "bell
tolls" signaling the end- of a funeral, or of life. She instead chooses the image of herself, sitting in
"Silence", then the visual imagery of some strange Race"
Once more, action is repeated for emphasis, taking her the final step, metaphorically, the
lowering of her coffin into the grave- a metaphor for the end of life,
I dropped down and down-
And hit a World at every plunge,
And Finished knowing-then- (20)
Each time a physical action is repeated it is used as alliteration for emphasis.
By utilizing these figures of speech in conjunction with the ballad meter the feeling of being
marched over by the masses is successfully conveyed. The mourners are a metaphor for all the
people in her life that mattered, just as the people at a funeral would be all the people who had
touched her life. And because everyone mourns at one time or another it is a very unifying
description of how all people affected her life. Everyone is a mourner at some point in time. Yet
while people do what they are supposed to in attending her funeral, they have not done what they
needed to help her in life. They have fulfilled their societal obligation to her, and nothing more.
They met the image of being there for her, but in fact, were not able to help her in life. It is a
definite statement of the nature of man, and how they do what looks right without doing what is
really needed.
In this way she also depersonalizes everyone in her world and holds no particular individuals
responsible for her mental breakdown. It was the collective "they" that were responsible for her
demise. Beyond when they were directly treading on her, to when they were seated is perhaps a
reference to when she secluded herself from people and she still could not escape what was going
on inside her head. Clearly she holds the people in her life, and not herself, responsible for her
own mental demise. They were unaware of what was happening, contributing to her demise
without knowing that they were doing it.
"A Service, like a Drum-" (6) is a reference to the normalcy of everyday life that people went on
living while she was falling apart. Yet the blame is laid upon them with the metaphor of "With
those same Boots of Lead" again, implying that even though the funeral is over as their take her
to her grave, the torment is not. "Then Space - " or loneliness, "began to toll."
The final indignity is illustrates when:
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul (10)
When they would lift the coffin from the bier to remove it from the church, they actually tore at
her very sole, as if the death of her mind was still not the end. With what should normally signal
the end of a funeral service, and though the treading and the beating had ended, pain still
prevailed as they strip the last of her with a damage that extended to her very soul. This time it is
not a hard strike at her, but now, in the softness of her soul, just a creak, a small torment at the
essence of her being. They wanted there to be nothing left of her, implying that all that they had
already done to her was not the end, but there was more suffering left, just when she thought the
suffering was over.
This suffering was at the hands of the same people who had caused her suffering all along, with
"same Boots of Lead" returning to the hard intrusiveness of their earlier offenses.
In the 4th and the 5th stanza it changes to jagged meter to further stress the chaos towards the
end for the speaker. The rhythm that has kept us comforted all along in the natural order of
things and how death is just a matter of fact part of life. Now the meter becomes jagged as the
speaker's mental space deteriorates.
Again metaphor is used:
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear (11)
Where synecdoche dramatizes the point by reducing people to being described as an ear, to
illustrate that they are made up of what they hear, a very negative explanation of what kind of
people they really are. Additionally, she separates herself further form other people in telling us
she, and "Silence, some strange Race" are as totally different from the people who are merely
"Ears." So different as to be a different Race, also emphasizing her loneliness, with the idea that
people of different races at that time would have been not only different but probably would not
have related to each other, or empathized with the issues that those from another race would feel.
She not only separates and isolates herself in this description, but also implies that this is an
unchangeable situation for her. It is not merely that the people do not understand or relate to
her, but the implication that closeness with them is not even possible.
At this point the speakers point of view also changes and she goes from speaking about a funeral
in the abstract top focusing on her. Suddenly it is no longer a story about a funeral, but about
what happened to her and then reason is shown to make no sense to her. Suddenly it is about the
speaker,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here- (16)
Next she dramatizes her isolation one step further by describing herself and the other race as
"Wrecked, solitary, here-" telling us certainly that there is no hope for her or others like her, that
they are broken and alone. The "Silence" can also be another reference to her isolation with its
implication of separation from the rest of the world. While they are described as an " Ear" she is
trapped alone in silence. This would make her (the silent one) useless to everyone else (the Ear).
Further, the implication is that she does not need communication with others, which the "Ears"
seem to rely on, and it is something that they share from which she is excluded.
When in the last stanza:
And I dropped down, and down-
And hit a world at every plunge (19)
She portrays dying on different worlds to try and find the right world and be able to find herself.
This illustrates that she continues to try to save herself at every possible opportunity.
The word "And" is used at the beginning of every line in this final stanza, giving further rhythm to
the descent- used to emphasize the dropping and subsequent "hit a world at every plunge" as you
can almost hear her body at it is further tormented. She does not merely sinks into the abyss, or
drop into the grave, but suffers all the way down. The implication is that there was pain at every
attempt, as she "hit a World-at every plunge," rather than just passing worlds on her way down,
instead she hit each one.
Paula Bennet describes this plunge's religious implication by stating, "There is neither a
sustaining God nor a sustaining scaffold of meaning to support her. Like the trapdoor on a
gallows or like the planks supporting a coffin until it is dropped into the grave, the 'bottom' drops
out of reality." This presents her idea regarding God and his existence or at least his role in her
life. It further illustrates her loneliness to show that even God could not help her.
The image of "And then a Plank in Reason, broke," gives us a dreadful vision- a coffin, awaiting
its solemn trip into the grave is instead plunged into the hole in the ground when the plank
breaks. This provides a vision of pain, or a final indignity, depriving the person of leaving the
world in a respectable manner. Perhaps the implication of society delivering the final blow in
"dropping" her, allowing her to "plunge" into her grave. A final note that people not only pushed
her over the edge, but gave no regard for her human dignity in letting her fall until the very end of
understanding. This further portrays how long this descent took, that it was not in a brief instant,
but a long, laborious process in which she "dropped down and down".
Further, she accentuates her frantic efforts to survive, as she "hit a World at every plunge". Her
pain until the final moments is dramatized, illustrating her will and efforts to somehow survive,
not giving up until there was nothing left- no other worlds to try.
Until she had hit every world and still descended, "Finished knowing -then-" but then letting us
know that perhaps it was not the end because the stanza ends with a dash, implying that it is not
the end. This could be a statement about eternal life, that even after death of a person or even a
mind, that they someone still go on.
A note of importance is that the final line of this poem was removed from the published version.
The last line, as written was
Crashed-got through (21)
The implication of the plunge ending with a "Crash", a violent landing, and then "got through"
could let us know that it was not necessarily the end of her existence. Perhaps a reference to the
afterlife, implying that there is something beyond earthly life, perhaps an afterlife where she will
find her place. "got through" implies something positive at the end, in that for her, it did not end
at all. This addresses her feelings of hope in the end, in opposition to the implication that exists if
we view "And Finished knowing-then" leaves much less hope, except that it also does not end.
The final printed line ends with a dash, and the final unpublished ends without punctuation.
Perhaps this suggests that she still does not know when it ends, either life or herself. With either
ending, it is not final. No matter how great the loss of the mind or of life, the implication is that
there is still a part of someone that in some way does not end. In end, her questioning nature
prevails and does not die, even if she believes that she has lost her mind.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain was first published in 1896. Because Emily Dickinson lived a life of
great privacy and only published a handful of poems in her lifetime, the exact year of its composition
is unknown; most scholars agree that it was written around 1861.
Like many of Dickinsons other poems, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain explores the workings of the
human mind under stress and attempts to replicate the stages of a mental breakdown through the
overall metaphor of a funeral. The common rituals of a funeral are used by Dickinson to mark the
stages of the speakers mental collapse until she faces a destruction that no words can articulate. As
the metaphorical funeral begins and progresses, the speakers mind grows numb until her final
remark stops in mid-sentence. The poem is a staple in Dickinsons canon and reflects her ability to
replicate human consciousness in a controlled poetic form. Like her poems After great pain, a formal
feeling comes, Hope is the thing with feathers and I felt a Cleaving in my Mind, I felt
a Funeral, in my Brain uses concrete language and imagery to explore abstract issues.
The event that the funeral is used to describe, however, does not have to be interpreted as a mental
breakdown. The poem allows for other readings of what constitutes the funeral, such as an
individuals being assaulted by an idea that threatens to destroy all of his or her dearly held
assumptions or a minds inability to cope with the pressures placed upon it from the outside world.
The poems ambiguities allow for multiple readings, all of which, however, converge in the idea that
the speakers brain is ceremoniously laid to rest by the poems conclusion.


After great pain, a formal feeling comes (372)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone

This is the Hour of Lead
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow
First Chill then Stupor then the letting go


After great pain, a formal feeling comes...
Summary
The speaker notes that following great pain, a formal feeling often sets in, during which the
Nerves are solemn and ceremonious, like Tombs. The heart questions whether it ever really
endured such pain and whether it was really so recent (The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
/ And Yesterday, or Centuries before?). The feet continue to plod mechanically, with a wooden way,
and the heart feels a stone-like contentment. This, the speaker says, is the Hour of Lead, and if the
person experiencing it survives this Hour, he or she will remember it in the same way that Freezing
persons remember the snow: FirstChillthen Stuporthen the letting go.
Form
After great pain is structurally looser than most Dickinson poems: The iambic meter fades in places;
line-length ranges from dimeter to pentameter; the rhyme scheme is haphazard and mostly utilizes
couplets (stanza-by-stanza, it is AABB CDEFF GHII); and the middle stanza is five lines long, rather
than Dickinsons typical four. Like most other Dickinson poems, however, it uses the long rhythmic
dash to indicate short pauses.
Commentary
Perhaps Emily Dickinsons greatest achievement as a poet is the record she left of her own
inwardness; because of her extraordinary powers of self-observation and her extraordinary willingness
to map her own feelings as accurately and honestly as she could, Dickinson has bequeathed us a
multitude of hard, intense, and subtle poems, detailing complicated feelings rarely described by other
poets. And yet, encountering these feelings in the compression chamber of a Dickinson poem, one
recognizes them instantly. After great pain, a formal feeling comes describes the fragile emotional
equilibrium that settles heavily over a survivor of recent trauma or profound grief.
Dickinsons descriptive words lend a funereal feel to the poem: The emotion following pain is
formal, ones nerves feel like Tombs, ones heart is stiff and disbelieving. The feets Wooden
way evokes a wooden casket, and the final like a stone recalls a headstone. The speaker
emphasizes the fragile state of a person experiencing the formal feeling by never referring to such
people as whole human beings, detailing their bodies in objectified fragments (The stiff Heart, The
Feet, mechanical, etc.).