"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" #15

After reading this poem a few times by myself, I was very confused about what was going on in it. When I went back through the poem and looked for patterns that stood out to me, I saw that there were sound repetitions incorporated in the work. This occurs three times in three different stanzas of this poem by Dickinson. In the first stanza, the word "treading" is repeated back to back. Following that, in the second stanza, the word "beating" is also repeated twice right next to each other. Finally, in the last stanza, the word "down" is used twice in the same line. Because these terms were used more than once, I realized that they were supposed to be emphasized and had further meaning. After reading the poem again in class with my small group, I realized that the poem should not be taken literally, and those repeated phrases started to make more sense. My group came up with the idea that the speaker was talking about his or her progression from reality and sanity to madness and insanity. All three of the repeated words collectively make me think of a huge weight on someone's shoulders. "Treading", "beating", and "down" make me picture someone losing a fight to some burden, problem, or issue in his or her life that they can no longer control. These significant examples of sound repetition helped me as a reader better understand what occurs in the poem. For my interpretation, they served almost like context clues by helping me fill in the blanks for what I didn't understand.