Madness

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"-Emily Dickinson

     Many of Dickinson's poems are very dark in nature, and this one is no exception.  This poem recounts the speaker's slip into insanity.  The scariest part for both the speaker and the audience: she was mentally competent enough to realize what was going on.  Throughout the stanzas, the audience can see the gradually worsening of the mental disorder.  Initially, the problem is relatively slow.  Then, it become worrisome and scary.  By the end, the speaker, mentally, has left this world.  "And I dropped down, and down--And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing--then--" (Dickinson, 776). Based on Dickinson's diction, I am unsure whether or not the speaker dies literally or figuratively in the end.  When the speaker's declares she "Finished knowing", I initially understood this as she had lost her mind, and there was no chance of salvaging.  I believe the speaker also nonchalantly refers to the way society treated her as the madness set in; however, she calls this group of people the general "them".  Therefore the audience knows not whether she is speaking of society or her close group of family and friends.