In my opinion, Emily Dickinson as a transcendentalist used her poetry to describe the process of transcendental meditation, particularly the meditation of death. In this poem she tries to allow us to expierience our true nature by entering directly into our conscious. The poem is a deep seeking of the nature of death, the death that is a process of expansion and transformation from solidarity to a spaciousness. When she says: "I felt a funeral …showed first 75 words of 383 total…

…showed last 75 words of 383 total…poem is only superficially about the funeral; It is "concerned with the intuitive knowledge of eternity gained through an intimation of death....." Monteiro In a sence the poet becomes the funeral and the series of events portrayed takes on "psychological signifiganceas a poetic expression of the disintegration of the ego." Walters "The poem is an interesting and extremely complex statement on the relationship between the body and the soul during a time of mental anguish."