Discuss how Dickinson's dark themes and eccentric style in "I felt a funeral in my brain" and "The soul has bandaged moments" can prove a challenge...

I think the challenge in reading Dickinson is to avoid the temptation of trying to "decode" her meaning. To me, her poems are more about tone and emotion. It is as if she is using words to try to express things that are somehow beyond words.

In "I felt a funeral in my brain," for example, one challenge for a reader would be to understand what "funeral" is she talking about -- does she mean an actual funeral, one that she attended, or is the poem about how she imagines her own funeral? Or is she trying to articulate a particular feeling -- perhaps the funeral is for her reason, and she is trying to describe the feeling of going insane? In any case, the difficulty comes from the complexity and ambiguity of her images, which combine and recombine as if in a dream. Take the lines "And then I heard them lift a box" -- a coffin, presumably -- "And creak across my soul" -- here her soul has become the floor, "creaking" under the weight of the "boots of lead," until a "plank of reason" breaks, causing her to fall into eternity, where at last she "finished knowing." She may have finished, but our interpretations are only beginning!

The other poem you mention, "The soul has bandaged moments," also can be understood as a poem about the tyranny of reason, although here Dickinson's inspiration seems more explicitly Gothic. The soul, bandaged like a mummy, perhaps, or simply bandaged because it has been injured, is "saluted" by fright, which "caresses" her "freezing hair." These attentions somehow liberate the soul, which dances "like a bomb" abroad -- a dangerous thing, on the loose. Somehow her soul is recaptured, a "Felon led along, /With shackles on the plumed feet, /And staples, in the Song," and "returned" to the "horror" -- the horror of reason, social convention? It is hard to say, so it is much better, in my view, not to try.