I heard a Fly Buzz - Essay Plan

‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died’

Useful Link: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/fly.html

Terror / Death / Entrapment / Hope and Hopelessness / Afterlife / Isolation  

Introduction

-          (Terror) ‘Corridors‘ in ‘The brain’ in One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted - conveys the horror inside a person – the hidden and scary places in a mind are more dangerous than ‘external ghosts’

-          (Entrapment) The last night that she lived where she expresses the pain of being trapped in the world that is ‘awful’ to her.  She sees being ‘dead’ as a way to escape from the pain

-          ‘Despair’ in It was not death, for I stood up that shows the image of her drifting away from hope

-          ‘The Fellow’ as a phallic symbol of danger in A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Central Symbol

-          ‘Fly’ is a common symbol for corruption or a demonic presence (like Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies)

-          The speaker juxtaposes two disparate elements

o   The trivial occurrence of hearing the ‘fly’

o   Death, an important of a person’s life:  ‘when I died’

-          The fly appears in her death, as a negative figure

-          It ‘interposes’ the silence in the scene: This creates a sense of bathos as the ‘buzz’ of a fly distracts the dying figure. 

-          It is perhaps that the fly becomes the central figure of the poem – much of the final stanza is dominated by the fly.  Rather than the rituals of death, attention is focused on the fly. 

-          Dickinson’s use of symbolism foregrounds the power of the fly and immediately foreshadows the doom in the poem – The Fly comes between ‘light’ and the speaker

-          It is possible that the light represents eternal life: The speaker who hopes to escape from the sufferings in her current life is blocked by the Fly in her final reach to the ‘King’ (reference to Christ of God)

-          This conveys the pain in entrapment: The speaker is trapped by the ‘buzz’ of a Fly, only a trivial problem

-          This is further emphasized in the final line where she ‘could not see to see’.

-          As physical sight recedes the speaker could be suggesting a failure of perception – the inability to see through to the glory of the next life

-          Hopeless -> cant go to heaven / trapped in present life

It was not death, for I stood up where she depicts the nearing of the end ‘when everything that ticked has stopped’ with the metaphor of ‘grisly frosts’.  She is afraid of the ending where she will be drifted away in a boat ‘without’ a ‘report of land’

Techniques

-          The poem is a typical hymn metre with pararhyme on lines 2 and 4 until the final stanza

-          The use of hymn structure perhaps alludes the poem to the criticism of religion

-          The speaker’s message to the ‘King’ who failed to save her from pain, the ‘storm’

-          The speaker conveys incompletely due to the fact that she is trapped between her life and heaven.  This idea is enhanced by the use of pararhymes like ‘Room’ and ‘Storm’.  This indicates the fear inside her to forbids her to construct normally. 

-          She is broken and damage inside and this is clearly reflected in her rhyme scheme.  We see her attempt to search for order in her stable quatrains; however, she has failed to do so as the constant use of parahyme still reflects chaos and distress. 

-          Yet, after constant half rhyme, a full rhyme of ‘me’ and ‘see’ is found in the last stanza, providing a strong sense of conclusion.  Has she found a solution? Perhaps not, the speaker suggests that ‘the Windows failed’ and she ‘could not see to see –‘.  This maybe the implication of the speaker’s surrender.  We sense no hope in the final line of the poem. 

Similar to What mystery pervades a well, a pararhyme of ‘glass’ and ‘face’ suggests Dickinson’s fear of the ‘abyss’s face’ and the invisible entrapment of the ‘lid’

Others: the idea of unfamiliarity

-          Only ‘eyes around’, not relatives, nor friends

-          This suggests her lack of connection towards her current life – she is isolated

-          This might emphasise her fears as she intensifies her want of a better life after her current one which she does not have any connection to

-          She implikes that the ‘eyes’ have ‘wrung dry’ when she died, conveying that she has no more emotion to the people around her. 

-          This idea is furthermore elaborated as she ‘[wills]’ her ‘keepsakes’ and claims them as ‘patrons’ of her, displaying her confused state of mine due to her fear – she oddly weights objects over human beings. 

-          This sense of unfamiliarity there shows her difficulty to survive in a world by herself with no one to depend on but her ‘keepsakes’.

Likewise, in Because I could not stop for Death where she has more attachment towards the figure of ‘Death’ than the people, the ‘children’, the fields of grazing grain’ and the ‘setting sun’ in the world.  This conveys her sense of unfamiliarity.  She suggests that ‘the day’, her last day of life is fearful and ‘centuries’ in her grave ‘fears shorter than the day’.