Emily Dickinson "i Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" "because I Could Stop for Death"

Death in Emily Dickinson Poems

Death has always been one of man kinds biggest questions. Where do you go after death, what happens after death, and what do you see after death. Are questions that no one has answers to, but is something many people think about and therefore make death a scary thought. Emily Dickinson, is a poet who also has an interest in death and the after life. She writes two poems with the same theme which is death, but they are different in how she perceive death. In the poem “ I heard a fly buzz- when I died,” seems like the speaker is passively sitting there waiting for death. In “Because I could not stop for death” the character is not just going to sit and wait for her life to end. Instead the speaker is going to live life and just let death come to her naturally.

In the poem “I heard a fly buzz when I died” the feeling of death being present in the room is the tone. In the poem the speaker writes “For that last onset- when the King/ Be witnesses- in the room.” I believe what she is trying to say is that the King is God and she passivley sits there and waits in silence until God is witness in the room and takes her to heaven. The fly buzzing plays a significant part of this poem, because since she is so close to death, she can hear things that the normal average individual wouldn’t notice. Since hearing is the last sense you lose before you die, the buzzing of the fly was heard in greater detail than you would hear when you are alive and well. Flies also prey on animals and rodents which are dead, which can be evidence that the speaker could be possibly dead already, and could possibly be speaking to the audience from her after life. In the fourteen and fifteen line she writes “ And then the Windows fail- and then I could not see to see-” She is referring to her eyes as windows and once they fail, her eyes close and she could no longer see, which means her life has come to an end. When she says see to see, I believe she could not see now, but she could see meaning that she could see in her after life.

In her other poem “Because I could not stop for death” the tone of death seems to approach her in a more welcoming and kind way. The first line of the poem “Because I could not stop for death,” explains how she is very caught up in her life and