Respond to a Reading: Emily Dickinson, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”
Read the poem “I heard a Fly Buzz—when I died—” below and respond to the questions in the margin. When you are done, submit your response.
Emily Dickinson
(1830–1886)
Emily Dickinson, one of three children, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father was a prominent lawyer. Except for one year away at a nearby college and a trip with her sister to Washington, D.C., to visit her father when he was serving in Congress, she lived out her life, unmarried, in her parents’ home. During her trip to Washington, D.C., she met the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a married man, whom she came to characterize as her “dearest earthly friend.” Little is known of this relationship except that Dickinson’s feelings for Wadsworth were strong. In 1862, Wadsworth moved to San Francisco, an event that coincided with a period of Dickinson’s intense poetic creativity. Also in that year, she initiated a literary correspondence with the critic T. W. Higginson, to whom she sent some of her poems for his reactions. Higginson, although he recognized her talent, was puzzled by her startling originality and urged her to write more conventionally. Unable to do so, she concluded, we may surmise, that she would never see her poems through the press. In fact, only seven of her poems were published while she was alive, none of them with her consent. After her death, the extraordinary richness of her imaginative life came to light with the discovery of her more than one thousand lyrics.
This poem takes the perspective of a person on his or her deathbed. How do other people appear in the poem? Why do you think Dickinson reduces them to their “Eyes” and “Breaths”?
What exactly does the buzzing of the fly interrupt? How is this speaker preparing for death? What does he or she expect to happen at the end of life?
What do you think happens in the last stanza of the poem? Explain what light, windows, and seeing mean to you in this context.
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air—
Between the Heaves of Storm—
1
The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset—when the King
Be witnessed—in the Room—
2
I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable—and then it was
There interposed a Fly—
3
With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—
Between the light—and me—
And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—
Emily Dickinson. "Because I could not stop for Death—" and "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—." Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.