I Heard a Fly buzz-when I died - Research Paper Example

Emily Dickenson and an Obsession with Death For Emily Dickenson, death was a fascination that was a large part of her poetic work. Despite the fact that she is suppose to have been a proper New England woman, her writing reflects a morbidity that sometimes might be compared to that of a teenage boy, full of obscure and dark humor, but filled with a fascination with illness, death, and the many ways in which death can be accomplished. In her poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died - “, she focuses on a small detail within the room of someone who dies, the speaker of the poem being the recently deceased.

The poem reads as a commentary about the moment of death, stripping away the mystery, and creating a moment in time in which the simplest of distractions takes precedence. Emily Dickenson was born in December of 1830 and died in 1886. She is known for her reclusive life, marked by the fact that she never married and defined by an eccentricity that had her contemporaries thinking of her as rather odd. Near the end of her life, most of her friendships were restricted to correspondence, her time spent in seclusion.

According to Moliken, her life was mostly unremarkable, lived quietly in her eccentricities and without making much of a mark on her community. However, upon her death, her sister found a locked box that contained 1,775 poems which she considered to be a monument to her sister’s life, thus she worked towards seeing them published. Much of her work is about the topic of death, her obsession with it in the form of rebellion against it. The losses she experienced in her life seemed to leave her resentful towards death (Bennett 73).

In looking at her work, “I Heard a Fly Buzz when I Died -“, one sees the theme of death, but this time in a much more friendly construct. She seems to have made peace, for the moment, with the concept of death and her poem describes the moment of the fictional speaker’s passing. The primary use of metaphor within the poem is the allusion to nature throughout the discourse. She equates the breath of death with the stillness of the calm that comes in pauses within a storm. Dickenson says “The Stillness in the room/ Was like the Stillness in the Air - /Between the Heaves of Storm” (Moliken 248).

The imagery that is evoked is of the natural world, suggesting that the passing is just as expected and unexpected as the norms and surprises that are present within nature. The paradox within the poem is that of the self, almost set aside as the identity is lost to the last moments of death. Hoeveler and Schuster state that “the narrator signs away all that is assignable, she severs her ties to the material world; she rids herself of what defines her” (30). In her last moments, this corpse is only the sum of her last moments of experience.

Bennett suggests that this poem, though not dated, might be considered as part of the work that was done after Dickinson had difficulties with her sight (25). The last stanza can be read for its allusion to this period of time. “And then the Windows failed - and then/ I could not see to see -” (Moliken 248). However, the more obvious allusion that it makes is to the moment when the eyes no longer work, they go cold without sight and fail to transmit to the person who has passed into death.

The passing of her sight is conveyed through an understatement of the event, a simple telling that it happened and that she no longer could see what she had focused on between herself and the light - the fly. Most of the work has a euphony to the sound of the words, a slight disharmony occurring in the second stanza, but brought back to a pleasantness within the sounds of the phonetics within the work. This helps relate the reader to the natural element, the slight off sounds reminding us of the unpleasantness of death, but brought back to a sweetness within the last stanza.

The poem is constructed mostly with the use of enjambment, the thought of one line running onto the next, creating a strange and startling sound when read aloud. The lines must be watched for their grammar, each line defined individually either by being end-stopped, such as the first line, which represents a complete thought: “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died:” (Moliken 248). However, the next three lines, “The Stillness in the room/ Was like the Stillness in the Air - /Between the Heaves of Storm” (Moliken 248) are enjambed.

This gives the poem an unusual rhythm, the words not bouncing in a comfortable way from line to line, but shifting slightly out of natural time, giving the poem a uniqueness in it delivery. As much as it is not overly emotional about the passing, it reads as if it were a stream of consciousness, the last that the corpse experienced as her light faded from the world. Interestingly, the last stanza has a rhyme between the second and fourth line which significantly changes and mildly accelerates the rhythm.

The fly can be seen as symbolic of the natural aspect of death, a part of the cycle of life that can be observed and witnessed. The poem delivers the point of view of the dying, those last moments when all has been done that could be done within a life, when he or she has given up her hold on all that is related to the life that would be left, and now witnesses the event of their own passing. The poem is not overly reverent, but neither is it without reverence. It simply reveals resignation, without despair, into the embrace of what is a natural event within the lives of every living thing.

Dickinson was obsessed with the theme of death, its morbidity and a rejection of it a lingering theme within her work. However, in this piece, there is the sense that even in her rejection of the pain that it offers, there is an understanding too that death has a natural purpose and that in the end, life has a resolution. Works Cited Bennett, Paula. Emily Dickinson, Woman Poet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. Print. Hoeveler, Diane L, and Donna D. Schuster. Women's Literary Creativity and the Female Body.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Moliken, Paul. D. Poetry. Clayton, Delaware: Prestwick House, 2006. Print. Wolff, Cynthia G. Emily Dickinson. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1988. Print.