Paula Bennett: On 280 ("I felt a Funeral, in my Brain")

In the extraordinary "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," written, according to Franklin's dating, in 1862, she describes figuratively the terror she had experienced, and its explosive effect on her, in terms of a confrontation with existential dread. Forced to look life's abyss "squarely in the face"--as she says in a later companion poem, "I never hear that one is dead" (no. 1324; P, 915)--she felt her world split apart, leaving her "Wrecked, solitary here," the numb survivor of some kind of shattering internal cataclysm which she compares to madness, death, and loss.