Funeral

Question 1

‘I felta Funeral –in my Brain,’
Abrupt first linediction

‘Mourners’ + ‘tread’ + ‘to and fro’

Capitalization + metaphorVerb connotationsmonosyllables

‘beating -beating’ + ‘ a service -like a Drum’
Epizeuxis + plosive allit

‘Boots of Lead’ + ‘creak across my soul.’
Polysyndeton + emjambmentImageryonomatopoeia

Answer 1

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

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

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

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

Question 2

‘space began to toll/As allthe heavens were a Bell.’
Liquid consonancesimile

‘Being but an ear’
Metaphor + synecdoche

‘wrecked’ + ‘some strange race’
Adjective / assonance

‘I and silence’
assonance

Answer 2

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)

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

speaker feels ‘wrecked’ w/in ineffablesolitude; no longer themselves, they become another species 2 themselves (accenby assonance ‘strange race’)

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

Question 3

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

finished knowing –then-
Slant rhyme + dashes (one of them indeterminate)

Answer 3

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

2 possible readings: ‘finished knowing’ = loss of sanityORslant 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’)
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