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Imagistically the poem follows the progression of a New England funeral. In the opening verse the mourners walk 'to and fro' as if paying their last respects to a coffin lying in the nave of a church. As the funeral service begins, they take their seats and listen. When the service is over, the mourners lift the coffin on to their shoulders and bear it to the churchyard while the funeral bell tolls its monotonous knell. In the churchyard the coffin is placed on planks over the deep grave. But a plank breaks and the coffin drops down, bumping against the sides of the grave until it finally comes to rest at the bottom.
However, the funeral is not an external one: it is experienced within the mind of the narrator. The insistent treading of the mourners, the drum-like service, the leaden footsteps, and the tolling of the bell, all function as images of the terrible pressures exerted on a mind which can no longer cope and which is pushed to the edge of madness.
Finally reason, the ability to think and know, snaps under the pressure like a plank and the poet plunges into the merciful release of unconsciousness. The attack on the poet's sanity is focussed on one faculty - her sense of hearing ('treading', 'beating', 'creak', 'toll'). In the fourth verse all sensation is compressed into this one sense (hearing is the last sense to depart at death) and the whole universe into one sound, the tolling of a bell. This intrusive noise becomes so alarming that it fills the whole mental world of the victim: in her obsessive state nothing else exists. It is as if everything were an intolerable noise and the suffering human being had no other sense but hearing. This unbearable condition in which the poet feels utterly desolate - her only companion is silence and she imagines the pain of them (ship) wrecked on a desert island cut off from all human contact - is relieved by a plunge into unconsciousness. The outstanding feature of the poem is the gradual, unrelenting build-up through repetition 'treading-treading','beating-beating' to the agonising climax and then the fall away to nothingness. Temporal adverbs and conjunctions - 'till', 'when', 'till', 'then', 'again', 'then', 'again', 'then', 'then' - emphasise the unrelenting forward movement towards the final breakdown.
According to psychologists each individual possesses an 'ego boundary' - the normal distinctions between what a person sees as himself and what he sees as the world outside of him. In certain disturbed states this boundary becomes confused and the individual might feel himself to be part of something else e.g. the sound of a bell. When a person can perceive and understand the world around him, but feels distanced from it and from himself, a condition called depersonalisation occurs. The mentally-ill person sees himself as an observer and sometimes feels he is dead because he is unable to feel.
'I felt a Funeral' is a carefully constructed analysis of a mental experience which, while it creates the illusion of a mind falling into the abyss of severe depression, was obviously composed after, and not during, the experience itself. The poem is an intense examination of personal grief which transcends its particular limits to become a universal account of any human soul that has suffered and endured.
