funeral Flashcards
’ I felt a Funeral-in my brain’
abrupt opening line startles reader w speaker’s mental anguish / tactile verb ‘felt’ + visceral noun ‘brain’ indicate speaker’s psych torment + fragility physically painful
‘mourners’ + ‘trad’ + ‘to and fro’
mourners capitalised= power they represent thoughts + emotions tormenting speaker / ponderous verb ‘tread’ combines w 3 monosyllables ‘to and fro’ (link: Opp House) creates painful sense of incessant thoughts torturing speaker
‘beating-beating’ ‘a service like a drum’
ref to funeral service for own sanity epizeuxis + plosive allit of ‘b’ show speaker’s mind = brutally assailed not by clear words of service but meaningless sound
‘boots of lead’ + ‘creak across my soul’
describes moment coffin picked up + carried out of church polysydeton ‘and’ + enjamb escalation speaker’s perturbation / heavy ‘boots’ ‘creak’ across soul onomatopoeic ‘creak’ creates unsettling sense of tremor through speaker’s psyche
‘space began to toll’ ‘as all heavens were a bell’
liquid consonance + simile funeral heads towards graveyard plangent sound ‘bell’ heard intoning speaker’s anguish + liquid consonance ‘all’ + ‘bell’ = mournful sound elongated as if speaker’s distress becomes projected onto world beyond (link: birdsong in Hope)
‘being but an ear’
metaphor + synecdoche of speaker referring to themselves as ‘ear’ signifies they feel reduced to single bio entity rather than a fully integrated self / ear seems doomed to become overwhelmed by ‘bell’ of distress
‘wrecked’ + ‘some strange race’
adjective and assonance restates their despair speaker feels shipwrecked w/in terrible sense of psych iso as if ‘some strange race’
‘I and silence’
assonance wishing solitude they become silence itself.
‘a Plank in Reason, broke’
h/w S5 may see turn in charac. of ED’s poems on despair / x2 readings: 1) breakage metaphorical plank = total loss sanity / 2) moment liberation ‘break’through
