“Giving kids clothes and food is one thing but it is much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important, and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people.” - Dolores Huerta

Monday, March 30, 2015

Poem Analysis

I Felt a Funeral, In My Brain by Emily Dickinson

TPCASTT:  Poem Analysis Method:  

Title of poem means: 
The title of the poem refers to the death of one's interior which includes the intellectual and the emotional. 

Paraphrase parts of the Poem:
The character feels a funeral in their brain, they see the mourners coming, and being put into a box. The character/narrator feels completely alone, but then he begins to reason and begins to spiral out of control. And he hit a world, reality, and finished knowing. 

Connotation of some of the words – changing literal meaning to implied or associated values: 
Mourners - sadness, crying, accepting the loss of
Treading - walking without a route, not knowing what should come next
Numb - absence (of feeling or life)
Box - trapped, enclosure, or the casket, suffocating
Space - infinite, without limits, darkness, fear
Heavens - purity, angels, white, God
Solidarity - silence, despair, sadness
Finished - death

Attitude What is the attitude of the author, characters or yourself?:
The attitude of the author and the character is hopeless. They have given up on trying, they are depressed, and the story has a gloominess to it, which makes sense because of the funeral setting. The readers are also put into this mood that things are over and that nothing can be done to return to a state of happiness, or to recuperate what has been lost in intellectual or emotional matter. 

Shift At first we think or feel one way – then there is a shift:  identify the shifts and explain them: 
The shift comes in the last stanza, where the character seems to be broken out of their trance and spirals out of the little control they had left, coming face to face with reality. 

Title revisited Any new insights on meaning or significance of title?: 
The poem is not written in the present tense, either the person has given up completely, or they have removed themselves from this type of thinking. 
Theme: 
All humans eventually feel like they have reached their max, or that they have spiraled out of control, the hard part is working up the courage to help ones own self.

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