ED-Funeral

Question 1

‘I felt a Funeral –in my Brain,’

Abrupt first line
diction

Answer 1

Abruptness + comb. tactile ‘feel’ + visceral ‘brain’ →mental precarity = immediate but also depersonalised (F = felt rather than seen directly)

Question 2

‘Mourners’ + ‘tread’ + ‘to and fro’

Capitalization + metaphor
Verb connotations
monosyllables

Answer 2

Mourners capitalized = power / they represent thoughts + emotions tormenting speaker / These thoughts ‘tread’ incessantly + heavily (‘to and fro’) across speaker’s brain / ‘to and fro’ = concrete rep. of repetitive, heavy steps

Question 3

‘beating -beating’ + ‘ a service -like a Drum’

Epizeuxis + plosive allit

Answer 3

Epizeuxis + plosive ‘beat’ →sense that mind assailed not by clear words of service, but by meaningless sounds, which sound ‘like a drum’; t/f, ED’s depiction of alienation of speaker feels protomodern

Question 4

‘Boots of Lead’ + ‘creak across my soul.’
Polysyndeton + enjambment Imagery
onomatopoeia

Answer 4

Poly + enjambment →escalation speaker’s perturbation / heavy ‘boots of lead’ create onomat. ‘creak’ across soul (unsettling sense tremor through psyche)

Question 5

‘space began to toll/As all the heavens were a Bell.’

Liquid consonance
simile

Answer 5

Plangent sound of bell rep. speaker’s anguish + liquid consonance (‘all’ + ‘bell’) sees the bell’s toll stretch out timelessly →speaker’s anguish projected onto world beyond (personal melancholy becomes universal despair)

Question 6

‘Being but an ear’

Metaphor + synecdoche

Answer 6

Reduction to single biological entity = loss of psychological cohesion / loss of boundary between the speaker’s mind + outside world

Question 7

‘wrecked’ + ‘some strange race’

Adjective / assonance

Answer 7

speaker feels ‘wrecked’ w/in ineffable solitude; no longer themselves, they become another species 2 themselves (accen by assonance ‘strange race’)

Question 8

‘I and silence’

assonance

Answer 8

Within this solitude, they become like silence itself– accen by assonance ‘I’ + ‘silence’

Question 9

A Plank in Reason Broke + ‘Hit a world at Every plunge’

Metaphor
diction

Answer 9

2 possible readings:
breakage plank = final loss of sanity
OR
Moment of liberation (a ‘break’ through): this underscored by ‘hit a world at every plunge’: new sequence of perceptions?
EXT: have to break with ‘standard ways’ of knowing + speaking to achieve revelation

Question 10

‘finished knowing –then-‘

Slant rhyme + dashes (one of them indeterminate)

Answer 10

2 possible readings:
‘finished knowing’ = loss of sanity
OR
slant rhyme + dashes before and after ‘finished knowing –then-’ = X mental disintegration, but speaker breaking free metrical + psychological convention / by surviving their suffering, they have discovered a new, unusual, truth (a truth told ‘slant’)