For the vast majority of my life, I felt alienated from and misunderstood by not only my peers, but the entire world around me. However, upon finding Emily Dickinson's poem "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -" three years ago, I finally felt as though I connected to something and I have intimately identified with it ever since. Because Dickinson lived and wrote during the 19th century, much before my time, the fact I connected to her poem was reassuring to me. It helped me feel less alone by teaching me through its existence that there were and always have been people who would understand me, even if only through their enduring poetry.
Beyond just reassuring me that I am not alone, part of why I so deeply enjoy "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -" is because of the euphoric experience Dickinson induces through proffering the reader a new perspective on something unknown--death. Through the impossible nature of the poem's first-person narration, which occurs post-death, Dickinson weaves a complex and multifaceted commentary on the act of dying. Her utilization of figurative language, synecdoche, and hyphenation characterizes death as the inevitable King that reclaims someone in their final heave of life; yet, "I heard a Fly buzz" goes deeper than that--it manages to succinctly express the multi-dimensional emotions surrounding death without directly explicating them.
The poem begins almost nonchalantly, as though the narrator's own death is an afterthought, especially to the overall concept of Death. The most prominent symbol of death throughout the poem is the fly, whose buzzing is simultaneously mundane and paramount in the narrator's experience of death. It indicates that even though the narrator has "willed [her] Keepsakes" and gotten everything in order for her death, the nuisance of the buzzing still infiltrates her final moments. The narrator recounts that the fly goes so far as to interpose itself "between the light - and [her]-" as if to be a physical representation of the narrator's disconnect with life. Moreover, through the fly's buzzing, death embeds itself within the poem. One of Dickinson's most noted stylistic decisions is her use of seemingly random dashes. Although editors have frequently eliminated the dashes in reprints of her work because of the conflict between their aggrandized sense of self and their inability to understand the intent of the hyphenation, the dashes are a significant and compelling aspect of her work that should not go ignored. In "I heard a Fly buzz" the hyphens build tension by adding pauses within the rhythm of Dickinson's perfect iambic meter. In this way, the hyphens are to the poem what the fly's "Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz" is to the narrator's final moments.
Beyond the fly, death adopts the face of the "King" who will "Be witnessed - in the Room -" to claim the life of the narrator. Especially due to its capitalization, the King is often interpreted as God, who has come to take the narrator to heaven. However, along with hyphens, capitalization of common nouns permeates much of Dickinson's work, meaning that the King is not necessarily God. Furthermore, Dickinson had a contemptuous relationship with religion, often exploring her struggle with God through her poetry. This can be prominently seen in her poem "Mine - by the Right of the White Election!" wherein she reveals her belief in the merit of individualism during the oppressive onslaught of religious judgment. Therefore, if the reader chooses to interpret the King as divine, it should only be in the sense that death acts as a sort of god through its power over all life.
With extremely skilled brevity, Dickinson constructs an unobtrusively perceptible context to the poem by writing "the Eyes around - had wrung them dry - / and Breaths were gathering firm." The synecdoche of the eyes represents the loved ones surrounding the narrator and reveals through their having been "wrung... dry" that they have been crying in mournful anticipation of the narrator's death. However, the breaths now gathered firm disclose that the loved ones have come to terms with the narrator's quickly approaching death and sit awaiting its arrival. The eye imagery continues into the last stanza with "and then the Windows failed - and then / I could not see to see -." Eyes have long been considered the windows to the soul, yet, even if this cliché was not noted by Dickinson at the time of her writing the poem, eyes still function as the windows through which one views the world. She remixes this in a way that draws the reader into the poem by forcing them to consider how windows are able to fail--that is, only through not being able to see through them. Thus, Dickinson uses the failed windows to indicate the narrator can no longer see because she has finally died. The poem represents this in content but also form, as the ending of the poem is in a way its own death. The conclusion of the poem provides a final sense of closure to resolve the tension built up by the first-person impossible narration and broken iambic meter, whereupon the reader can also no longer "see to see."
Despite the pseudo-death of the poem's ending, it continues to live on through its continued reading. As noted previously, my first encounter with this poem was many years ago, and it has still stuck with me--even to the point that I wrote it on the wall next to my bed my first quarter of college. Due to my seeing it every day for months on end, memorizing this poem for recitation in class was not altogether incredibly challenging. The difficulties I did face in preparing to recite "I heard a Fly buzz" consisted mostly of struggling to know how to bring it justice through my performance. Although I feel connected to the poem (and Dickinson, in the limited way I am able through her poetry), it feels daunting and nearly narcissistic to try to imbue the poem with any more meaning. Therefore, what I decided to do in my recitation of the poem was to not be overdramatic and have my performance distract from the beauty of the piece. Rather, I would speak in a way that lends itself to Dickinson's stylistic choices--pausing on the hyphens to disrupt the meter and projecting the capitalized words. Through deeply analyzing and getting to know this poem, I feel as though we have now more than connected; I have absorbed it into myself just as it has absorbed a piece of me. Although a selfish part of me just wants the poem to be between itself, me, and Dickinson, I am both glad and relieved that it is not. I have no doubt that others have felt as alone and misunderstood as I did prior to reading "I heard a Fly buzz," and without this poem having been shared as rapidly and widely as it has, I and many others would never have found relief in its embrace.
My gratefulness for the fact I was able to read the poem goes beyond wanting to thank Dickinson's sister for publishing her works posthumously. It extends to the affordances of the technological realm; without technology, I almost assuredly would never have found this poem and might still be feeling as isolated as I once did. However, I simultaneously am conscious of the limitations technology imposes on me as a member of the modern world. It is frightening to consider how corporations profit by infringing upon our privacy and making technology unavoidable. Feeling inundated with inescapable technology, having something that the dominant public sphere cannot take from me is comforting and feels almost rebellious. By memorizing "I heard a Fly buzz," I have given myself a forever reassuring piece of art that cannot be taken from me as my privacy has. Further, even if the whole world went dark with loss of power and the digital realm vanished, the beauty of Dickinson's work could continue to be passed down through generations by oral tradition.
"I heard a Fly buzz" is riveting and teeming with beauty in every corner of its death-laden stanzas. Through the process of analyzing and memorizing this work, it became a portion of me that is unassignable--a piece of me that technology cannot exploit. It exists within my mind as something that cannot just be scrolled past. Instead of hitting the reblog button, it can be shared in an act of connecting with people face to face, inspiring conversations rather than passive onlooking. This connection between the listener and performer in its recitation and the connection between the poem and reader saturate the poem with life, so all the while it is a meaningful commentary on the nature of dying and the faces that death adopts, it is also interposed--as the Fly--between the reader and their fear of dying.
Henceforth referred to as "I heard a Fly buzz"
