A disquisitional reading of a classic Dickinson poem by Dr Oliver Tearle

Expiry is a theme that looms big in the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-86), and peradventure no more than so than in the celebrated poem of hers that begins 'I heard a Fly buzz – when I died'. This is not only a poem about death: information technology's a poem most the upshot of death, the moment of dying. Below is the poem, and a brief analysis of its linguistic communication and meaning.

I heard a Wing buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Betwixt the Heaves of Tempest –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry out –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that final Onset – when the Rex
Exist witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portion of me exist
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –

With Blueish – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –
Between the low-cal – and me –
And and so the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to encounter –

'I heard a Wing buzz – when I died': summary

In summary, 'I heard a Fly buzz – when I died' is a verse form spoken past a dead person: note the past tense of 'died' in that kickoff line. The speaker is already dead, and is telling united states of america about what happened at her deathbed. (We say 'her' but the speaker could well be male – Dickinson often adopts a male voice in her poems, so the bespeak remains moot.)

And dying, one of the most momentous events in anyone'south life (and certainly the last), is foregrounded in that opening line – though not as much equally information technology could be. No, first we have to heard nigh the wing that buzzed.

The opening line, 'I heard a Fly buzz – when I died', is the opposite of bathos (that anti-climax where one starts grandly and so fizzles out, such as in Alexander Pope'southward celebrated line from The Rape of the Lock: 'Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea'): here, nosotros start with the small-scale – the literally small – and stop with the momentous, 'died'.

Everything, nosotros are told, was still and silent around the speaker's deathbed. Even the mourners attending her accept stopped weeping: 'The Eyes around – had wrung them dry', pregnant 'their eyes had wrung themselves dry out' or 'they had wrung their eyes dry out' with crying. At present's non the fourth dimension for tears: simply stillness and silence. Everyone, Dickinson's speaker tells u.s., seemed braced for the moment when the speaker of the verse form would dice, and the 'Rex' would be Emily Dickinson'witnessed' in the room – presumably King Death, coming to take the speaker away.

The speaker had just signed her will doling out her 'Keepsakes' to her beneficiaries, and it was then, we are told, after her concluding will and attestation had been signed, that the fly 'interposed' itself in the scene. 'With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz' uses Dickinson's trademark dashes to great effect, carrying the sudden, darting mode flies can move around a room, especially around lite.

We may not have idea of such a motility as 'stumbling' (tin can flying insects stumble?) and then the presence of the word pulls u.s. up brusque, makes us stumble over Dickinson's line.

'I heard a Fly buzz – when I died': assay

This fly comes between the speaker and 'the light'. Has she seen the light? How should we interpret this? Is it but the candle or lamp in the room lighting it (such as would concenter a bluebottle to it), or is the 'light' signalling the arrival of that 'King', Expiry? Has he come for her?

And why then do the Windows fail, and how should we analyse that last line, 'I could not come across to see'? Perhaps one clue is offered past the way we talk, in the English language linguistic communication, of 'seers' and 'second sight': seers were often blind in that they couldn't physically see, simply in another sense they saw farther than everyone else because they had the gift of foresight and prophecy (consider Tiresias from Oedipus Male monarch). 'Second sight', similarly, is a supposed grade of clairvoyance whereby the gifted person has admission to an invisible world – the earth beyond decease, for instance.

So the speaker could exist saying (at the moment of death itself?) that she could no longer physically see in order to find her fashion forrad into the adjacent globe. Consider the more everyday phrase, 'I can't practice right for doing incorrect': Dickinson's last line might be analysed as a cryptic variation on that expression.

Flies, of course, are associated with death and the dead: they feed on the expressionless. Notwithstanding the presence of this wing remains puzzling. How should nosotros analyse 'I heard a Fly buzz' in terms of its central paradigm or object: the wing itself? Is this association between decease and flies feeding on corpses and carrion all there is to information technology, or is it the deliberate juxtaposition of the very small (a mutual insect) and the very big (decease itself) that Dickinson wants us to think well-nigh? The question remains open.

Dickinson'south rhymes can ofttimes seem haphazard: half-rhymes, off-rhymes, words that accept just the vaguest sounds in common between them. Nonetheless in that location is a fragile interplay of rhymes in 'I heard a Fly fizz'. 'Room' and 'Storm' in that get-go stanza are echoed in the following stanza, which has 'firm' and 'Room'; 'died' becomes tautened, or dried out, into 'dry'; in the 3rd stanza, the 'be' that rhymes with 'Fly' calls up the 'Fizz' that is suggested by be(eastward), besides as the rhyming 'me' and 'see' in that terminal stanza. ('Buzz' is besides foreshadowed by 'was' in the preceding stanza, with this small-scale verb existence retrospectively encouraged to bring together in the onomatopoeia of 'Buzz'.)

In the final analysis, 'I heard a Fly fizz – when I died' is i of Emily Dickinson's most pop poems probably because of its elusiveness, and considering – like many of her great poems, and her meditations on death – it raises more questions than information technology settles. How do you translate the fly in this poem?

Most Emily Dickinson

Perchance no other poet has attained such a loftier reputation later their expiry that was unknown to them during their lifetime. Built-in in 1830, Emily Dickinson lived her whole life inside the few miles around her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. She never married, despite several romantic correspondences, and was improve-known as a gardener than equally a poet while she was alive.

Nevertheless, it'due south non quite true (every bit it's sometimes alleged) that none of Dickinson'southward poems was published during her own lifetime. A scattering – fewer than a dozen of some ane,800 poems she wrote in full – appeared in an 1864 album, Drum Beat, published to heighten money for Union soldiers fighting in the Civil State of war. But it was iv years after her death, in 1890, that a book of her poetry would appear before the American public for the first time and her posthumous career would begin to take off.

Dickinson collected around eight hundred of her poems into niggling manuscript books which she lovingly put together without telling anyone. Her poetry is instantly recognisable for her idiosyncratic use of dashes in place of other forms of punctuation. She often uses the 4-line stanza (or quatrain), and, unusually for a nineteenth-century poet, utilises pararhyme or half-rhyme as often as total rhyme. The epitaph on Emily Dickinson'due south gravestone, equanimous by the poet herself, features just two words: 'called back'.

If y'all liked this poem, you might also savour these 10 brusk poems nearly death, and Dickinson's classic poem about a snake, 'A narrow Fellow in the Grass'. If yous want to own all of Dickinson's wonderful poetry in a single volume, yous can: we recommend the Faber edition of her Complete Poems .

The writer of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English language at Loughborough University. He is the author of, amongst others,The Clandestine Library: A Book-Lovers' Journeying Through Curiosities of History  andThe Nifty War, The Waste material Land and the Modernist Long Poem.

Paradigm: Black/white photo of Emily Dickinson by William C. N (1846/7), Wikimedia Commons.