I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died, By Emily Dickinson

Death is a controversial and sensitive subject. When discussing death, several questions come to mind about what happens in our afterlife, such as: where do you go and what do you see? Emily Dickinson is a poet who explores her curiosity of death and the afterlife through her creative writing ability. She displays different views on death by writing two contrasting poems: one of a softer side and another of a more ridged and scary side. When looking at dissimilar observations of death it can be seen how private and special it is; it is also understood that death is inevitable so coping with it can be taken in different ways. Emily Dickinson’s poems “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died” show both

Emily Dickinson is one of the most important American poets of the 1800s. Dickinson, who was known to be quite the recluse, lived and died in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, spending the majority of her days alone in her room writing poetry. What few friends she did have would testify that Dickinson was a rather introverted and melancholy person, which shows in a number of her poems where regular themes include death and mortality. One such poem that exemplifies her “dark side” is, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. In this piece, Dickinson tells the story of a soul’s transition into the afterlife showing that time and death have outright power over our lives and can make what was once significant become meaningless.

Emily Dickinson's poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" is centralized on the events of death and is spoken through the voice of the dying person. The poem explores both the meaning of life and death through the speaker and the significant incidents at the time of near death that the speaker notices. Many of Dickinson's poems contain a theme of death that searches to find meaning and the ability to cope with the inevitable. This poem is no exception to this traditional Dickinson theme; however its unusual comparisons and language about death set it apart from how one would view a typically tragic event.

In opposition to “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, Dickinson published her work of “I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died”. In this particular piece of literature, the author disbeliefs in an afterlife. In this poem, a woman is lying on bed with her family surrounding her, waiting for the woman to pass away. The woman, however, is anxiously waiting for “…the kings”, meaning an omnipotent being. Finally when the woman dies, her eyes or windows, as referred in the poem, “could not see to see “. When the woman passes away, she couldn’t see any angels or gods as she expected would be there, but instead, she is fluttered into nothingness. She isn’t traveling to an afterlife as she had expected to unlike in the poem of “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. The woman finds out that death is a simple end to everything.

Emily Dickinson’s poem, “465 I Heard a Fly Buzz—when I died—”, uses its form to emphasize the distracting elements in a human’s life. In the case of this poem, the appearance of multiple caesuras throughout the poem asserts the distractions the speaker is experiencing. With the help of the caesuras, the readers get to experience death as real life and not like as it is seen in the movies and this shows that distractions are around us at all time. Along with caesuras, Dickinson structures her poem with four stanzas. Each stanza represents the speaker getting closer and closer to death. the third stanza, however, there is a shift. In addition to caesuras, the shift brings in to play the element of distraction, which is the main theme of the poem.

Similar ambivalent themes are seen in Dickinson’s views of death. Death is primarily seen in a negative light and she supports that perspective in “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -” When Dickinson starts this poem, the reader senses a feeling of control from the narrator. The narrator is ready for death and accepting it; she writes “I willed my keepsakes - Signed away/ What portion of me be/ Assignable” and the audience sees her willingness to go. However, “There interposed a Fly” and this fly’s interruption created a change in tone. The narrator felt the windows fail and this could be seen as a metaphor for losing her “spot” in heaven. This poem makes death seem almost scary and one could assume that Dickinson views death this way. Contrarily, in “I like a look of Agony” she portrays death as a serene, authentic concept. The narrator says there is no faking death and that’s what they most appreciate of death. Dickinson creates a relaxing tone associated with death and upon reading this certain poem, a reader may assume she views death as calm and genuine.

One aspect of the poem that surprises readers is the relationship between the speaker and the fly .The first surprise involved in this relationship, is the combined revelation of the fly and the speaker’s death. As the poem begins, the speaker says to readers, “I heard a fly buzz-when I died” (Dickinson, 1). After reading that the speaker heard the buzz of a fly, readers may expect the death of the fly or more detail on the fly itself. However, the speaker hits readers by telling them that they heard the buzzing at the moment of their own death. Dickinson is immediately telling readers that her poem contains supernatural elements that link to the fly. This may come as a shock to readers, since they may ponder the significance of the fly within the speaker’s death, as it is not yet revealed by the end of the poem’s first line. The relationship between the speaker and the fly continues to be surprising, as the speaker describes the fly as the power that controls their life (the gateway between life and death). The speaker says:

Analysis of I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died and Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson’s poem “I heard a fly buzz when I died” is a reflection on what happens when one dies. In the poem, the speaker is waiting to die. It seems as though they are expecting something spectacular to happen at the moment of their death. This spectacular event they are expecting does not happen.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1836) is one of the greatest poets in American literature. Although she spent most of her life working in relative anonymity, her status rose sharply following her death and the subsequent publishing of much of her surviving work. Two of Dickinson’s most well-known poems are “Because I could not stop for Death—" and “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died”. I say known as because Dickinson never actually gave her poems proper titles. For this reason, the first lines of her poems have come to be used as a distinguishing reference. This paper will briefly analyze both poems in an attempt to both compare and measure their relative literary merits.

Two of Emily Dickinson’s poems, “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died” and “Because I could not stop for Death” are both written about life’s stopping point, death. Although the poems are written by the same poet, both poems view death in a different manner. Between the two poems, one views death as having an everlasting life while the other anticipates everlasting life, only to realize it does not exist. While both poems are about death, both poems also illustrate that the outcome of death is a mysterious experience that can only be speculated upon with the anticipation of everlasting life.

Emily Dickinson once said, “Dying is a wild night and a new road.” Some people welcome death with open arms while others cower in fear when confronted in the arms of death. Through the use of ambiguity, metaphors, personification and paradoxes Emily Dickinson still gives readers a sense of vagueness on how she feels about dying. Emily Dickinson inventively expresses the nature of death in the poems, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)”, “I Heard a fly Buzz—When I Died—(465)“ and “Because I could not stop for Death—(712)”.

This poem conjures images of a solemn ceremony in which the soul reigns superior by shutting out everyone, including the emperor, similar to the shutting out of everyone that Dickinson did. In one of Dickinson’s most famous poems, “I heard a Fly buzz,” the theme of death is presented as well as a symptomatic characteristic of bi-polar disorder. The poem itself epitomizes her preoccupation with death and the macabre and also shows how the small, normally ignorable sound of a fly buzzing becomes the only thing heard, she magnifies this sound in a situation when it seems that everything else is much more important, but this inability to drown out extraneous noises is typical of someone suffering from manic-depression. The form of this poem employs all of Dickinson’s formal patterns: trimeter and tetrameter iambic lines, her specific use of the dash to interrupt the meter of the poem, and it is in ABCB rhyme scheme.

I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died –, written by Emily Dickinson, is an interesting poem in which the poet deals with the subject of death in a doubtful yet both optimistic and pessimistic ways. The central theme of the poem is the doubtfulness and the reality of death. The poem is written in a very unique point of view; the narrator who is speaking is already dead. By using symbols, irony, oxymoron, imagery and punctuation, the poet greatly succeeds in showing the reality of death and her own doubtful feelings towards time after death.