Heard a Fly Buzz by Emily Dickinson

¶ … heard a Fly buzz" by Emily Dickinson In her poem "I heard a Fly buzz," Emily Dickinson explores the moment just before the death of the narrator, as she watches a fly buzz about in the final moments before sight fails her.

In comparing the human experience to the buzzing-about of a fly in the face of a mortal curtain, Dickinson presents a simultaneously clinical and emotionally subjective consideration of death that examines the minute physical details of a scene in order to extract some ultimate meaning before the finality of death. The fly serves as a reminder of the banality of death as well as the importance of the meaning bestowed by human perception.

According to Eric Wilson, in his essay "Dickinson's Chemistry of Death," "Dickinson, avatar of Janus, takes a double stance […] she approves the power of the scientific method for exploring the corpse while undercutting the validity of scientific conclusions about the enigmas of dying" (Wilson 28). Though at first glance "I heard a Fly buzz" appears to have no explicit examination of a corpse, in fact the narrator's own body is the corpse, even if it does not fully become that until after the conclusion of the poem.

Thus, the fly, with its "uncertain stumbling Buzz," can be initially read as a literal fly buzzing around the speaker's soon-to-be-corpse, the last image the speaker sees before "the Windows failed" and death overwhelms her (Dickinson lines 13, 15). In this initial reading, the fly represents the coldly analytic presentation of the body and works in conjunction with the poem's strictly sense-perceptional description of the moment of death.

Aside from the third stanza, each subsection of the poem involves a sense perception of the immediate environment of the soon-to-be-corpse, but these sense-perceptions offer the bridge between the speaker's "double stance"; on the one hand, these descriptions seem to fit in with the strictly scientific, objective presentation of the body moments before death, and the attention to the fly can be seen as a way of demystifying the corpse and its accompanying fauna.

On the other hand, these same sense-perceptions offer a look at the ultimately futile human attempts at finding meaning in the coldly objective world, because each of these perceptions is automatically given an additional weight and ultimate meaning, as they are the final sense-perceptions of the speaker. In this way, the fly is elevated to an almost totemic position, because it offers one final subject for which the speaker to orient her thoughts around before the finality of death erases all perception and thought.

That the poem requires reading on the objective, scientific level as well as that of a subjective consciousness comes in the first line, "I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died --, " because "the moment we finish reading the sentence, the moment-in-the-past being told is distinguished from the moment-in-the-present of telling. The grammatical completion of the sentence coincides with a logical anomaly: We're being spoken to by a dead person" (Dickinson line 1, Ryan 15).

Thus, while the treatment of the corpse and body deals only with the senses, for instance hearing the buzz of the fly and "the stillness in the room," feeling that "the Breaths were gathering firm," and finally seeing the fly, "interposed […] with Blue," the post-mortal status of the speaker suggests that these sensory perceptions bear extra meaning (Dickinson lines 1-2, 6, 13). In fact, as mentioned before, they bear an ultimate meaning, because they are the final sense-perceptions of the speaker's life.

In a way, the speaker is a ghost, but a ghost forever trapped in the final moments just before death, and able to relay the final bits of sensory information perceived but never able to transcend the veil of perception following the moment of death.

Thus, the fly becomes more than just the corpse's accompaniment, but is rather carried over into death by the ghost of the speaker in the form of these final sense perceptions, so that the buzzing of the fly is the sound of the poem's eternal passage between life and death. The speaker is the dead narrating the moment of death and the fly is the something like the physical embodiment of humanity's buzzing, hyperactive search for meaning and importance in the face of that death.

By recounting the individual sense-perceptions regarding the fly, the ghost of.