Emily Dickinson's I Heard A Fly Buzz

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In Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died,” the speaker, in the first stanza, is dying and in a very calm moment. Death however is not always a calm process and the speaker recognizes this when he states, “The Stillness in the Room/ Was like the Stillness in the Air-/ Between the Heaves of Storm” (Dickinson 1013). There seems to be a rhythm to death similar to her poetry. The poem is written in Iambic meter, meaning that the second syllable is stressed throughout the poem. When the poem is read aloud, the reader can hear how every other line is eight and then six syllables giving the entire poem a nice rhythmic feel. As the speaker dies, there are passionate “Heaves of Storm” and then calmer “Stillness” (Dickinson 1013). …show more content…
If she used “I heard a fly buzz-when I died” to ease her own fears of death and after-death, these other poems may have held the same purpose for her. In her poem “A Death blow is a Life blow to Some,” the poem seems to say that even those who did not live life to the fullest will become vibrant and vivacious after death. Dickinson lived most of her life away from the public eye. Did she maybe feel like she had not lived her life to the fullest? If so this poem would have given her hope for her life after death. The speaker states, “A Death blow is a Life blow to Some/ Who till they died, did not alive become” (Dickinson 1020). This line implies that after their deaths some individuals become more alive than they were while …show more content…
Death comes to the speaker in a carriage. There is nothing scary or intimidating about death when he comes to pick you up in a carriage. Then death takes the speaker past everyday images of a school, fields of grain, and then the sunset. The speaker states, “We passed the School, where Children strove…/ We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain-/We passed the Setting Sun” (Dickinson 1018). Each of these images are, like the fly, very mundane normal scenes that the speaker would have seen many times through his life. They also represent the seasons of life, childhood, middle age, and old age. These are also simply a part of life’s normal
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