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This also shows that her expectations and assumptions were larger than life and did not really have anything to do with reality. It says that she had a high opinion of herself and her importance, and that she was disappointed that her grand dreams did not come true. She expected a lot more from death than it actually delivered, and she feels cheated somehow.
It is ironic that she feels death is such a grand experience because most people fear death. She seems almost to have welcomed it, but when it happened, the fly took her attention from everything else and eventually blocked the light, leading to the real, absolute experience of death, which is nothing and nothingness. Dickenson writes, "With Blue -- uncertain stumbling Buzz -- / Between the light -- and me -- / and then the Windows failed -- and then / I could not see to see -" (Dickenson). This shows the fly is death, blocking the light...
This adds to the sad, depressing nature of the poem.
Ultimately, the fly and the reality of death make the reader question their own importance and their own expectations of their life and death. If the great poet Emily Dickenson was only greeted by a fly at her passing, then what does the reader have to expect from death? The assumption is probably even less. So, the fly represents death in this poem, but it also represents people's expectations of their own death and their own importance. The fly signifies the relative unimportance of each of us in a much larger and grander universe. People might think they have a lasting legacy, but many of them are as unimportant to the universe as a fly is unimportant to us. That seems like a sad message for this poem, but it is probably closer to the truth than most people…
Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound Ezra Pound's poem "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is inspired by Chinese poetry, and dramatizes the situation of the Chinese wife of a traveling salesman. In its empathetic portrayal of the life of a woman, it resembles poems by Emily Dickinson -- but the difference is, of course, that Pound's form is fundamentally dramatic. Pound announces, in his title, the speaker of the poem. Dickinson's lyric
Emily Dickinson and "The World is Not Conclusion" The poems of Emily Dickinson have been interpreted in a multitude of ways and often it is hard to separate the narrator of her works with the woman who wrote them. Few authors have such a close association between the individual and their work as Emily Dickinson. In Dickinson's poetry, the narrator and the poet are often seen as interchangeable beings. Themes that
" typical way in which a poem by Dickinson is structured is by the use of the "omitted center." This means that an initial statement is followed by an apparent lack in development and continuity and the inclusion of strange and seemingly alien ideas. However, these often contradictory ideas and images work towards a sense of wholeness and integrity which is essentially open-ended in terms of its meaning. "Often the
The study of geology becomes a central underlying theme in many of her works due to the influence of Hitchcock. Dickinson adopted the view that the study of nature should be an intermingled spiritual as well as naturalist journey, and as a result, places strong emphasis on how to explore spiritual and romantic Truth, through the allegory of nature and geology. Dickinson's poetic vision was not to advocate the strong
.. "I could not see to see" (from Dickinson, "465"). Words; phrases, and lines of poetry composed by Dickinson, within a given poem, are also typically set off, bookend-like (if not ruptured entirely at the center) by her liberal use of various punctuation "slices" (or perhaps "splices" is the better word) appearing most often in the form of either short and/or longer dashes (or combinations of these), e.g.: "-"; and/or
Emily Dickinson's poem 632 ("The Brain -- is wider than the sky -- ") is, in its own riddling way, a poem that grapples with the Christian religion, while at the same time being a poem about the poetic imagination itself. Dickinson's religious concerns are perhaps most evident when considering the form of the poem (and indeed the form of so many of her poems). The meter and the rhyme