poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

this poem is kinda hard to understand. to put it briefly, it is an allegory pertaining to the persona's loss of consciousness, or even the loss of sanity, but it is NOT the loss of life. in the last line "And Finished knowing—then—" death has not come, the end is not really there, "then" refers to a continuation. although the poem is finished, it continues, it's simply that words can no longer describe the experience of the persona.
The metaphors in the poem arre excellent and lend to the imagery of the piece. I would just like to say that "Ear" and "Being" are awesome exemples of literary symbolism. they really make a person think.

When looking for research, one looks for an intellectual critique of the object of the research. One does not look for a misspelled, childish opinion of a poem. One expects words such as "examples" to be spelled correctly and words like "kinda" and "awesome" to be missing from commentary. One would not take such commentary into consideration for their reseach unless one was as retarded as the commentator. Get a dictionary, it will get you far in life.

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—

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—then—


It is, in a sense, about the wall of consciousness. It is about losing one's mind to find one's mind--about losing knowledge in order to find it. Like many of her poems, and of all true wisdom, the ideas are paradoxical, complicated enough to reveal the complexities of the 'inner world'.

She locates the mind ("brain") as a part of the soul. I would agree. The mind does have quite an impact on who we are.

The soul, though is not limited to the mind, just as we are not, and I think this is the poem's truest insight: man must go beyond reason for true knowledge. The death is that of the clinging to understanding everything by way of reason. What died was that particular epistemology: what lived was the realization that this was necessary for true knowledge.

Revelations of this sort continue on, once the mind has been released...

The thing that i don't understand is why in all the books that i have read that contain the poem, none of them included the last four lines of the original. "And then a plank......" to "i finished knowing then..." is omitted from every poetry book. why is that?