I heard a Fly buzz — when I died

Emily Dickinson’s letters reveal a loving and family-oriented individual. “It is a sweet feeling to know that you are missed and that your memory is precious at home,” she wrote in an 1847 letter while attending Mount Holyoke. “Only to think that in two and half weeks I shall be at my own dear home again” (Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson Letters. Edited by Emily Fragos, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Like her, neither of Dickinson’s siblings moved away from Amherst. All three chose to stay at one of the two houses on the family property. The Homestead seemed to possess a loving atmosphere. Dickinson’s father notably gifted her any book she desired. She was famously close with her siblings and sister-in-law. Dickinson even offered her cousins to stay with her after they became orphaned in 1863. The lack of explicitly defined relationships within “I heard a Fly Buzz—when I died—” seems strange from a biographical context. Readers must consider Dickinson’s typical enigmatic writing style and her admission that her poems’ speakers did not always represent her. However, her life and values still shaped her poems, so it remains important to analyze the ways Dickinson’s diction shifts the poem into an elegy (a poem of mourning, usually dedicated and about a deceased individual) for the connections dissolved as a person dies.

Throughout the poem, only first-person pronouns appear. The action of the piece directly focuses on the speaker’s experiences as “I.” The Fly and the King (God) are the only other beings with distinct, named identities within the poem (Lines 1, 7, 12). Eyes and breath exist, but Dickinson does not give them clear or individual ownership (Lines 5-6). “The Eyes around—had wrung them dry— / And Breaths were gathering firm / For that last Onset,” Dickinson writes (Lines 5-7). Instead of possessive pronouns, Dickinson uses “the” in front of Eyes (Line 5). Wrung and dry denote the action of crying thanks to their link to water (Line 5). As a result, the “them” clearly refers to “the Eyes” rather than the whole of the mourners (Line 5). The sentence continues with “And Breaths,” the first “the” acting as the preposition for both “Eyes” and “Breaths” (Lines 5-6). Dickinson capitalizes both “Eyes” and “Breath” as if the body parts are proper names and denoting a specific person (Lines 5-6). The “Breaths” appear to collect themselves automatically in response to the template of the deathbed scene (Lines 6-8). Again, the reader does not see the mourners directly take action. The individuals are obscured and subsumed by the experience of death and the expectation of the Good Death. The mourners remain quiet, seeming to wait for the speaker to give them assurance and wisdom. No one says anything to comfort the speaker. The decorum of the Good Death prevents any meaningful interaction or healing from occurring between the living and the dying.

Death blocks out and severs any relationship. Death culminates and takes. The reader does not even learn who “my Keepsakes [were] Signed away” to nor the identity of whose house the speaker dies in belongs (Lines 8-11). The reader only knows the house has “the Room” with “Windows” (Lines 8, 15). The speaker’s detached, concise tone, and the syntactical unfolding of the speaker’s identity as dead and dying as the last word of the first line brings the reader directly into co-sharing the speaker’s experience. “The Room” must be any room because the experience of dying disconnects people from all else. Death enacts upon individuals without agency or intent. It is not the Fly that draws the speaker’s attention; it is that the Fly buzzes (Lines 1, 11-13). Even the Fly drops away at the end, leaving only sound (Line 13). Then the speaker does not even get to have the mourners’ presence around her, even if she cannot give us their names.

Death pushes her into utter isolation, where she “could not see to see” (Line 16). Any gifts, any beloved memories of home, or any comfort from hearing a sibling one room over is gone. “It could not hurt His Glory, unless it were a lonesome kind, Dickinson wrote about Heaven. “I ‘most conclude it is” (Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson Letters. Edited by Emily Fragos, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Death cannot save or bring these kinships along to whatever awaits the dead.