I felt a Funeral, in my Brain Suffering Quotes

What exactly does a funeral feel like? Is it painful? The person is already dead, so it can't be that painful, right? The first line of the poem raises a distinction between two types of feeling that will return later in the poem. These two types are sensation and numbness. Sensation is the sensitivity to feeling, and numbness is the opposite. The funeral suggests pain or trauma but also quiet and rest.

The end of the first stanza highlights the speaker's sensitivity to feeling. Her "sense" breaks through some barrier. What is this barrier? It might be associated with the floor of the place where the funeral is being held. The continued walking of the mourners increases the speaker's tendency to sensation. She almost seems to be positioned below the floor.

The repeated words in the poem like "beating" and "treading" reinforce a sense of unpleasantness. The sound has invaded her space, and she isn't happy about it. In the first stanza, the treading of the mourners causes her to feel more, but now the continued beating of the service makes her mind go numb or lose feeling. This idea is consistent with the principle that the mind can only take so much of anything, whether it be noise, pain, whatever. Does the numbness mean that she won't suffer anymore?

This seems to us to be the most painful line in the poem. Boots of Lead? Come on! This woman can't catch a break here. The suffering in this poem mostly comes on two fronts: noise and weight. If we imagine her as the floor or as beneath the floor, these heavy boots are pressing down from above. What does "again" mean here? Has she gone through this whole experience some time before in her life, or is she only referring back to the "treading" of the first stanza?

Throughout the poem, the speaker has been in a passive position, with people literally walking all over her. Now, she reworks this passivity on a cosmic scale. She's just an ear inside a giant, universal bell. If you've ever put your ear next to a gong or the opening of a large bell as it rings, you'll know that this is not a pleasant position to be in.

Like a match of interstellar bumper cars, the speaker collides with a different "World" as she falls. What does "at every plunge" mean? Does she go through multiple falls, or is her fall broken up into different stages? The phrase "finished knowing" has been likened to blacking out after a lot of painful. It's another example of the mind and body only being able to take so much.