I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died and Because I Could Not Stop for Death - Emily Dickinson

Brooke Leary

Professor Doty

TA Jeremy Specland

Poetry 201

“I heard a Fly buzz-when I died” and “Because I could not stop for Death”

In the two poems “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died” and “Because I could not stop for death” Emily Dickinson describes death as part of the life cycle.  Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems share a common theme, which is death, especially her poems “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died” and “Because I could not stop for death”.  In these two poems, they deal with a nature of death as part of the everyday life; however, “I heard a fly buzz- when I died” has a more dramatic tone and is more somber than the poem “because I could not stop for death.”  Emily Dickinson takes one word and turns it into two different ideas, while using two poems to explain the different aspects and views of it.

These two poems share the similarities of having the same topic, death.  The method I have noticed that Dickinson uses is that she picks her wording of both poems carefully so that it reveals the topic of what the poem will be about.  This lets the reader know from the beginning what the subject of the poems are about.  Although the only main similarity of these two poems is that they’re about death; they both differ significantly in ways like with the mood of each poem, tones, and the metaphor and irony use is very diverse in the two poems.

In the poem “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died” the speaker is looking back at the moment of their own death.  Once the speaker announced that she had heard a fly buzzing when she died, she began describing the moments that had led up to that one moment.  The first stanza describes the silence that takes over the room before she had died; describing that moment as if it is the quietness that happens between two storms, or like the saying, it is “the calm before the storm”.  The second stanza is describing the people that are present at the moment of the speaker laying on her deathbed.  She describes them as being exhausted from preparing for the final loss that is happening.  The middle of this poem emphasizes more about the silence being temporary and a fragile period of the poem, like her describing it as storms, its like suffering and weeping.  Towards the end of the poem, it returns to talking about the fly buzzing.  During those moments, it is like the speaker is describing something that is not a storm, but is an indelibly moment of transition.

In the poem “Because I could not stop for Death”, the speaker is communicating from the grave, unlike the other poem from Dickinson.  The poem is describing the journey with death, personified from life to the afterlife.  In the very opening of this poem, the speaker talks about being too busy for Death, and so Death slowed down in its path and stopped for her. “Because I could not stop for Death-/He kindly stopped for me-“(line 1-2).  During the third stanza, the speaker begins to show us reminders of the world that they are passing from; children playing and fields of grain.  The speaker then begins to explain her place in the world in the end of the third stanza and the beginning of the fourth.  In the third stanza, “We passed the setting Sun-,” (line 12) but at the beginning of the fourth stanza, the speaker corrects to “Or rather- He passed Us-“ (line 13) meaning she was only now part of the landscape.  In stanza 5, the speaker beings to describe the carriage pausing at her new house, but the description of the house is not that it is a cottage, but instead a grave. “We paused before a House that seemed/A swelling of the Ground-“ (line 17-18 stanza 5).  The poem doesn’t directly say that it is the woman’s own grave, but the speaker speaks in ways as if it is their own.  When the speaker begins to talk about the woman looking at the “house”, it could indicate that the woman’s body is already resting beneath the soil in a casket.  During this poem, the speaker talks as if they’re speaking of their own spirit or soul, when talking of those terms it will usually mean that there is an afterlife involved.  That then helps to make sense of the woman only takes a “pause” at the “house” because it will only be the resting place since her soul will travel for eternity.

Between these two poems, there are many ways that Dickinson has used imagery, metaphor and symbolism to make them differ in their own ways.  “I heard a fly buzz- when I died” is a poem that is focused on the physicality of death.  In this poem, a woman is lying in bed with her family and/or friends surrounding her while waiting for her to pass away.  While the people around her are waiting for her to die, she states in line 7 that she is waiting for “the King” which will symbolize a god.  In the line where she starts to symbolize a god (line 7) it is like the speaker is speaking like they are waiting for that sort of god to take them away.  In the last 2 stanzas, the woman begins to die and as she dies her eyes, which are referred to the windows in the poem, begin to fail and she can no longer see anything and she “… could not see to see-.”  Before she dies, the speaker goes to say how she had seen “the light” but then her eyes, referred to the windows, failed and she then say nothing.  After reading those lines multiple times, it is as if the speaker is suggesting that there is no afterlife.  After she had died, the woman’s soul drifted into nothing because there was no afterlife for her soul to travel to.  This goes to show that the poem “I heard a fly buzz- when I died” and “Because I could not stop for death” have opposite beliefs about death and the afterlife.