![]() The insistent repetition of ‘treading – treading’ evokes the hammering and turbulence within the speaker’s brain. Her sanity and reason have died, and the chaos inside her mind is like the mourners at a funeral walking backward and forward. In the first stanza, the poem’s speaker uses the metaphor of the funeral for what is going on inside her head (we will assume that the speaker is female here, though this is only surmise: Dickinson often uses male speakers in her poetry). ![]() This Emily Dickinson poem is about going mad, about losing one’s grip on reality and feeling sanity slide away – at least, in one interpretation or analysis of the poem. It is, if you like, an elegy for the (imminent) death of reason, using the funeral as a powerful extended metaphor. ![]() ![]() This poem focuses on a different kind of death: the death of the mind, or the fear of going mad. Kept treading – treading – till it seemed ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |