("I Heard A Fly Buzz–when I Died") Essay, Research Paper
Gerhard Friedrich
This poem seems to present two major problems to the interpreter.
First, what is the significance of the buzzing fly in relation to the dying person, and
second, what is the meaning of the double use of "see" in the last line? An
analysis of the context helps to clear up these apparent obscurities, and a close parallel
found in another Dickinson poem reinforces such interpretation.
In an atmosphere of outward quiet and inner calm, the dying person collectedly proceeds
to bequeath his or her worldly possessions, and while engaged in this activity of
"willing," finds his attention withdrawn by a fly’s buzzing. The fly is
introduced in intimate connection with "my keepsakes" and "what portion of
me be assignable"; it follows—and is the culmination of—the dying person’s
preoccupation with cherished material things no longer of use to the departing owner. In
the face of death, and even more of a possible spiritual life beyond death, one’s concern
with a few earthly belongings is but a triviality, and indeed a distraction from a
momentous issue. The obtrusiveness of the inferior, physical aspects of existence, and the
busybody activity associated with them, is poignantly illustrated by the intervening
insect (cf. the line "Buzz the dull flies on the chamber window," in the poem
beginning "How many times these low feet staggered"). Even so small a
demonstrative, demonstrable creature is sufficient to separate the dying person from
"the light," i.e. to blur the vision, to short-circuit mental concentration, so
that spiritual awareness is lost. The last line of the poem may then be paraphrased to
read: "Waylaid by irrelevant, tangible, finite objects of little importance, I was no
longer capable of that deeper perception which would clearly reveal to me the infinite
spiritual reality." As Emily Dickinson herself expressed it, in another Second Series
poem beginning "Their height in heaven comforts not":
I’m finite, I can’t see.
. . . .
This timid life of evidence
Keeps pleading, "1 don’t know."
[#696—Poems, 1891, p. 197]
The dying person does in fact not merely suffer an unwelcome external interruption of
an otherwise resolute expectancy, but falls from a higher consciousness, from liberating
insight, from faith, into an intensely skeptical mood. The fly’s buzz is characterized as
"blue, uncertain, stumbling," and emphasis on the finite physical reality goes
hand in hand with a frustrating lack of absolute assurance. The only portion of a man not
properly "assignable" may be that which dies and decomposes! To the dying
person, the buzzing fly would thus become a timely, untimely reminder of man’s final,
cadaverous condition and putrefaction.
The sudden fall of the dying person into the captivity of an earth-heavy skepticism
demonstrates of course the inadequacy of the earlier pseudo-stoicism. What seemed then
like composure, was after all only a pause "between the heaves of storm"; the
"firmness" of the second stanza proved to be less than veritable peace of mind
and soul; and so we have a profoundly tragic human situation, namely the perennial
conflict between two concepts of reality, most carefully delineated.
The poem should be compared with its illuminating counterpart of the Second Series,
"Their height in heaven comforts not," and may be contrasted with "Death is
a dialogue between," "I heard as if I had no ear," and the well-known
"I never saw a moor."
JOHN CIABDI
I read Mr. Gerhard Friedrich’s explication . . . of Emily Dickinson’s poem with great
interest, but I find myself preferring a different explication.
Mr. Friedrich says of the fly: "Even so small a demonstrative, demonstrable
creature is sufficient to separate the dying person from ‘the light,’ i.e. to blur the
vision, to short-circuit mental concentration, so that spiritual awareness is lost. The
last line of the poem may then be paraphrased to read: ‘Waylaid by irrelevant, tangible,
finite objects of little importance, I was no longer capable of that deeper perception
which would clearly reveal to me the infinite spiritual reality.’"
Mr. Friedrich’s argument is coherent and respectable, but I feel it tends to make Emily
more purely mystical than I sense her to be. I understand that fly to be the last kiss of
the world, the last buzz from life. Certainly Emily’s tremendous attachment to the
physical world, and her especial delight both in minute creatures for their own sake, and
in minute actions for the sake of the dramatic implications that can be loaded into them,
hardly needs to be documented. Any number of poems illustrate her delight in the special
significance of tiny living things. "Elysium is as Far" will do as a single
example of her delight in packing a total-life significance into the slightest actions:
What fortitude the Soul contains,
That it can so endure
The accent of a coming Foot—
The opening of a Door—
[#1760—Poems, 1890, p. 46]
I find myself better persuaded, therefore, to think of the fly not as a distraction
taking Emily’s thoughts from glory and blocking the divine light (When did Emily ever
think of living things as a distraction?), but as a last dear sound from the world as the
light of consciousness sank from her, i.e. "the windows failed." And so I take
the last line to mean simply: "And then there was no more of me, and nothing to see
with."
CHARLES R. ANDERSON
In writing her best poems [Emily Dickinson] was never at the mercy of her emotions or
of the official rhetoric. She mastered her themes by controlling her language. She could
achieve a novel significance, for example, by starting with a death scene that implies the
orthodox questions and then turning the meaning against itself by the strategy of surprise
answers. . . . /231/ ["I heard a Fly buzz—when I died"] operates in terms
of all the standard religious assumptions of her New England, but with a difference. They
are explicitly gathered up in one phrase for the moment of death, with distinct Biblical
overtones, ‘that last Onset—when the King / Be witnessed—in the Room.’ But how
is he witnessed?
As the poet dramatizes herself in a deathbed scene, with family and friends gathered
round, her heightened senses report the crisis in flat domestic terms that bring to the
reader’s mind each of the traditional questions only to deny them without even asking
them. Her last words were squandered in distributing her ‘Keepsakes,’ trivial tokens of
this life rather than messages from the other. The only sound of heavenly music, or of
wings taking flight, was the ‘Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz’ of a fly that filled her
dying ear. Instead of a final vision of the hereafter, this world simply faded from her
eyes: the light in the windows failed and then she ‘could not see to see.’ The King
witnessed in his power is physical death, not God. To take this poem literally as an
attempted inside view of the gradual extinction of consciousness and the beginning of the
soul’s flight into eternity would be to distort its meaning, for this is not an
imaginative projection of her own death. In structure, in language, in imagery it is
simply an ironic reversal of the conventional attitudes of her time and place toward the
significance of the moment of death. Yet mystery is evoked by a single word, that
extraordinarily interposed color ‘Blue.’
To misread such a poem would be to misunderstand the whole cast of Dickinson’s mind.
Few poets saw more clearly the boundary between what can and what cannot be comprehended,
and so held the mind within its proper limitations. . . . /232/
CAROLINE ROGUE
Emily Dickinson’s "I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died" should be read, I think,
with a particular setting in mind—a nineteenth-century deathbed scene. Before the age
of powerful anodynes death was met in full consciousness, and the way of meeting it tended
to be stereotype. It was affected with a public interest and concern, and was witnessed by
family and friends. They crowded the death chamber to wait expectantly a burst of dying
energy to bring on the grand act of passing. Commonly it began with last-minute bequests,
the wayward were called to repentance, the backslider to reform, gospel hymns were sung,
and finally as climax the dying one gave witness in words to the Redeemer’s presence in
the room, how He hovered, transplendent in the upper air, with open arms outstretched to
receive the departing soul. This was death’s great moment. Variants there were, of course,
in case of repentant and unrepentant sinners. Here in this poem the central figure of the
drama is expected to make a glorious exit. The build-up is just right for it, but at the
moment of climax "There interposed a fly." And what kind of a fly? A fly
"with blue, uncertain stumbling buzz"—a blowfly.
How right is Mr. Gerhard Friedrich in his explication . . . to associate the fly with
putrefaction and decay. And how wrong, I think, is Mr. John Ciardi . . . in calling the
fly "the last kiss of the world," and speaking of it as one of the small
creatures Emily Dickinson so delighted in. She could not possibly have entertained any
such view of a blowfly. She was a practical housewife, and every housewife abhors a
blowfly. It pollutes everything it touches. Its eggs are maggots. It is as carrion as a
buzzard.
What we know of Emily Dickinson gives us assurance that just as she would abhor the
blowfly she would abhor the deathbed scene. How devastatingly she disposes of the
projected one in the poem. "They talk of hallowed things and embarrass my dog"
she writes in 1862 in a letter to Mr. Higginson (Letters, 1958, II, 415).Sharon Cameron
We must imagine the speaker looking back on an experience in which her expectations of
death were foiled by its reality. The poem begins with the speaker’s perception of the
fly, not yet a central awareness both because of the way in which the fly manifests itself
(as sound) and because of the degree to which it manifests itself (as a triviality). As a
consequence of the speaker’s belief in the magnitude of the event and the propriety with
which it should be enacted, the fly seems merely indecorous, as yet a marginal
disturbance, attracting her attention the way in which something we have not yet invested
with meaning does. In a poem very much concerned with the question of vision, it is
perhaps strange that the dominant concern in stanza one should be auditory. But upon
reflection it makes sense, for the speaker is hearing a droning in the background before
the source of the noise comes into view. The poem describes the way in which things come
into view, slowly.
What is striking in the second stanza is the speaker’s lack of involvement in the
little drama that is being played out. She is acutely conscious that there will be a
struggle with death, but she imagines it is the people around her who will undergo it. Her
detachment and tranquility seem appropriate if we imagine them to come in the aftermath of
pain, a subject that is absent in the poem and whose absence helps to place the experience
at the moment before death. At such a moment, the speaker’s concern is focused on others,
for being the center of attention with all eyes upon her, she is at leisure to return the
stare. Her concern with her audience continues in the third stanza and prompts the tone of
officiousness there. Wanting to set things straight, the speaker wishes to add the
finishing touches to her life, to conclude it the way one would a business deal. The
desire to structure and control experience is not, however, carried out in total
blindness, for she is clearly cognizant of those "Keep-sakes—" not hers to
give. Even at this point her conception of dying may be a preconception but it is not one
founded on total ignorance.
The speaker has been imagining herself as a queen about to leave her people, conscious
of the majesty of the occasion, presiding over it. She expects to witness death as
majestic, too, or so one infers from the way in which she speaks of him in stanza two. The
staginess of the conception, however, has little to do with what Charles Anderson calls
"an ironic reversal of the conventional attitudes of [Dickinson's] time and place
toward the significance of the moment of death." If it did, the poem would arbitrate
between the social meanings and personal ones. But the conflict between preconception and
perception takes place inside. Or rather preconception gives way only to darkness. For at
the conclusion of the third stanza the fly "interpose[s]," coming between the
speaker and the onlookers, between her predictive fantasy of the event and its reality,
between life and death. The fact that the fly obscures the former allows the speaker to
see the latter. Perspective suddenly shifts to the right thing: from the ritual of dying
to the fact of death. It is, of course, the fly who obliterates the speaker’s false
notions of death, for it is with his coming that she realizes that she is the witness and
he the king, that the ceremony is a "stumbling" one. It is from a perspective
schooled by the fly that she writes.
As several previous discussions of the poem have acknowledged, the final stanza begins
with a complicated synesthesia: "With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—."
The adjective "stumbling" (used customarily to describe only an action) here
also describes a sound, and the adverb "uncertain" the quality of that sound.
The fusion would not be so interesting if its effect were not to evoke that moment in
perception when it is about to fail. As in a high fever, noises are amplified, the light
in the room takes on strange hues, one effect seems indistinguishable from another.
Although there is a more naturalistic explanation for the word "stumbling" (to
describe the way in which flies go in and out of our hearing), the poem is so predicated
on the phenomenon of displacement and projection (of the speaker’s feelings onto the
onlookers, of the final blindness onto the "Windows," of the fact of perception
onto the experience of death) that the image here suggests another dramatic
displacement—the fusion of the fly’s death with her own. Thus flies when they are
about to die move as if poisoned, sometimes hurl themselves against a ceiling, pause, then
rise to circle again, then drop. At this moment the changes the speaker is undergoing are
fused with their agent: her experience becomes one with the fly’s. It is her observance of
that fly, being mesmerized by it (in a quite literal sense now, since death is quite
literal), that causes her mind to fumble at the world and lose grip of it. The final two
lines "And then the Windows failed—and then / I could not see to see—"
are brilliant in their underlining of the poem’s central premise; namely that death is
survived by perception, for in these lines we are told that there are two senses of
vision, one of which remains to see and document the speaker’s own blindness ("and
then / I could not see to see—"). The poem thus penetrates to the invisible
imagination which strengthens in response to the loss of visible sight.
I mentioned earlier that the poem presumes a shift of perspective, an enlightened
change from the preconception of death to its perception. In order to assume that the
speaker is educated by her experience, we must assume the fact of it: we must credit the
death as a real one. But the fiction required by the poem renders it logically baffling.
For although the poem seems to proceed in a linear fashion toward an end, its entire
premise is based on the lack of finality of that end, the speaker who survives death to
tell her story of it. We are hence left wondering: How does the poem imagine an ending? If
it does not, what replaces a sense of an ending? How does it conceive of the relationship
between past, present, and future? To address these questions adequately, we need to look
at some theories of time against which the poem’s own singular conception may more sharply
be visible.
from Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Copyright ? 1979 by The