And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum −
Kept beating − beating − till I thought
My Mind was going numb −
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space − began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here −
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down −
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing − then −
Before they’re able to let go and face reality, people enters a state of denial, refusing to accept the reality of the loss. The “Plank that held the speaker’s attempts to deny the reality of death “[breaks]” causing her to “drop down, and down” as she plummets into the void of acceptance and the dark reality. By “hit[ting] a World,” Dickinson suggests permanence, emphasizing the fleeting feeling of closure. Despite innate desires to find peace, closure is unattainable, elusive, and inaccessible for humanity. 
 By using the words “hit” and “plunge,” Dickinson engages effective diction, rendering a feeling of abrupt change — Dickinson thus mirrors drowning, suggesting one is immersed in failure to find closure. Furthermore, the speaker is “finished knowing,” proving the desperate attempts to legitimize death to be ill-fated. 
 Any pursuit of knowledge or logic has essentially been lost, leaving the speaker in a limbo-state of nothingness, stuck in between a world of naivety and a world of compliance. The speaker ultimately lingers in cynicism, confusion, and heartache, never understanding death. By concluding the last stanza with a dash, as opposed to a period, Dickinson amplifies the suffering that concurs with lack of closure; she closes the poem with ambiguity, the same vagueness that haunts the mourning process. 

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