I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died

“I heard a fly buzz when I died”

Many people have read a poem or two in their life time either as a child, in the higher years of education, or as an elder. Some people enjoy reading poems more than others, while others rarely pick up any kind of book. I am one of those people who rarely pick up a book; reading is not in my everyday agenda, especially poems, until I took literature for a class. The book that our class read was titled “Final Harvest” which is a compilation of Emily Dickinson’s poems. In this essay I intend on explaining the poem “I heard a fly buzz when I died” by Emily Dickenson, her way of thinking and the poem as a whole, identifying the interpretation and meanings of this poem in detail, and describing the different symbols the fly represents in this poem.

Emily Dickenson’s way of expressing her life and herself is through poetry. Even though her poetry was very vague and wordy, there is a lot of emotion expressed behind the indistinct lines. Dickenson was known to use pain and adversity in her poetry as a way to create something beautiful and mirthful. Dickenson thought of “pain as a precursor to living life vividly.” In “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” she writes about a lonesome kind of death. This poem is narrated by a dead woman, but also at the same time narrated by a woman on the verge of death, which brings many questions to my mind about if death, in this poem, is continuous? There are people around, but those people, those eyes, are not there to see her. The onlookers are there to see what is to come when death is upon a human being. But the onlookers are disappointed by the sight of a fly rather than their hopes of “the king.”

In the first stanza of this poem Dickenson makes the room silent except for the buzzing of the fly. Dickenson describes a pause between “heaves.” Heaves is a poly-vocal word which means a word can have more than one meaning. It means uplifting, and/or violent displacement. She writes that there was “stillness in the air between the heaves of storm.” “Between the heaves of storm” is a limenal space where anything can happen. A limenal space is a threshold, the line between two things. The “stillness in the air” is all the onlookers watching her and waiting for her to die in silence.

The eyes in this poem represent the onlookers around her in her death bead. They are the people there when she dies. Their eyes were “wrung dry” of tears, which means that the people who were witnessing the death made their grief weary some and just old news. The people were not really there for her death, but were for the “last onset.” “Last onset” is an oxymoron, because “onset” means beginning and “last” means an end. For many Christians, death is the onset of eternal life. In this poem death brings revelation, an exposure to something never seen before. The revelation that all these onlookers are waiting for is God, because

then the nature of eternity becomes known.

In the third stanza Dickenson writes as if she was ready to die. She “willed her keepsakes, signed away what portion of me could make assignable.” She cut off everything that attached her to this world. It is as if she is looking forward to death and what death could bring to her. The onlookers are also waiting for something after her death, perhaps a revelation for themselves. To the onlookers, death is very scripted and played out.

In comes an unruly fly, the revelation that everyone was waiting for, in the fourth stanza. Instead of it being a King, the onlookers witnessed a fly come into the room. This is not what everyone expected. “The windows failed,” which can possibly