In I felt a Funeral, in my Brain by Emily Dickinson, she is able to write about about her slow descent into madness. Emily Dickinson writes how she loses consciousness and slowly is absorbed by the darkness of her mind as she has no more control over herself.  I felt that while reading this that Emily Dickinson slowly described what it was like for her to descend into madness. With the line “Kept beating, beating, till I thought My mind was going numb” Dickinson shows how the constant effect that the madness has on her. She uses this metaphor to show how the darkness kept slowly creeping up on her and taking her over. This can be seen in the last stanza of the poem where Emily Dickinson writes “And then a plank in reason, broke And I dropped down and down–And hit a world at every plunge”. In this quote Emily Dickinson shows how she kept falling into a pit of darkness where she was standing on the edge of a plank to show her descent into becoming irrational. She shows that while standing on a plank is an insecure feeling because of how unbalanced she is, while having herself on the edge of that plank, her rationality is unbalanced as well, and in a single tip, could cause her to fall. She also states how she hits a world at every plunge, this could show how she plunges down her descent faster and faster, because of what is happening to her.