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.

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From My Life a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich, and Female Creativity. Copyright © 1986 by Paula Bennett. Reprinted with the permission of the author.