Essay
Death Essay
- Module
- Drama and poetry pre-1900
- Institution
- OCR
Comparing and Contrasting‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ and ‘I Heard A Fly Buzz-' on the theme of death.
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At the age of fourteen, death entered Emily Dickinson’s life through the bereavement of herclose childhood friend and relative, Sophia Holland. Dickinson lived at a time when death
was shifting from a social taboo to an extensive artistic focus that took place from the 19th
century to the present day. As the poet grew; so, did the presence of death as it surrounded
her in many ways, such as the fact her writing desk overlooked the local graveyard in
Amherst where she lived her whole life. This all led to the theme of death to permeate into
Dickinson’s poetry throughout her extensive writing career. Two such poems that dive into
this pervasive theme of death are ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ and ‘I Heard A Fly Buzz-
When I Died-’. Both poems share and disagree on certain explorations of this theme but
together they give the reader clear and interesting insights into the theme of death through
the poet’s eyes.
Firstly, we can see the exploration of the theme of death in every aspect of the two poem’s
DNA, extending insight into the very structure of both poems. ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’
utilises a structure that appears frequently in Dickinson’s poetry. The poet utilises five
quatrains that parallel the five steps of a puritan funeral. Stanzas one and two see the wake
and service for the deceased while stanza three carries us forward with the funeral
procession. Stanza four and five close the funeral proceedings with the toll of death knells
and the burial hence creating a narrative, hidden in plain sight that exhibits the hidden
unpredictability of death. Ballad rhyme (ABCB pattern) and common metre are utilised
within the poem and allow the reader to effectively explore the role of religion in death.
Common metre is frequently utilised in hymns, especially those of Reformed Churches- a
notable example being John Newton’s ‘Amazing Grace’ providing a clear link to religion.
It is this rigid metric pattern that demonstrates the unwavering ritualism that takes place
within Christian churches in the wake of death. The church was at the centre of Calvinist
society seen in Dickinson’s hometown of Amherst. What is interesting is how death stands
at the centre of Calvinism as it is seen as the climax of one’s life as they return to their
father in heaven.
Also, the fixed aspect of the structure in ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ is shared by ‘I Heard A
Fly Buzz- When I Died-’ and attains a very similar effect. This poem exhibits the same
alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter that composites common metre seen in ‘I
felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ that again displays the rigid and repetitive ritualism of death
within the church and the wider society that orbits it. However, many critics such as John
Green note that ‘I Heard A Fly Buzz- When I Died-’ is, “Dickinson at her most iambic.” The
poetic feet are much more defined and plosive in this poem when compared to other
examples of Dickinson’s work hence creating an emphasis on the dogmatic ritualism that
occurs within religion. This insight of Dickinson’s is carefully woven into the fabric of both
poems and although the structures are similar, they cannot be construed as a mere ‘pro
forma.’ Instead, death acts as a subconscious thematic core that underpins both ‘I Heard A
Fly Buzz- When I Died-’ and ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.’
Furthermore, Dickinson explores the death through the separation of the mourners and the
mourned in both ‘I Heard A Fly Buzz- When I Died-’ and ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’; “And
Mourners to and fro Kept treading – treading – till it seemed That Sense was breaking
through-” This first quote comes from the first stanza of ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.’ Within
it, Dickinson cleverly utilises the epizeuxis of ‘treading’ and the alternate prepositions to
, create a sense of perpetual motion that provoke an unsettling aural effect of constant
footsteps. It is this eerie effect that allows us to begin to discover Dickinson’s views on
death. A juxtaposition is set in the first stanza of the poem; between the perpetual motion
of the mourners that is unveiled above and the central image of the poem- a funeral (a
scene of solemnity and stillness). Through this juxtaposition, we can infer that Dickinson
perceives a separation between the dead and the living that opens as a great chasm
between the two groups. This idea of separation is perhaps perpetuated by Dickinson’s
relationship with Christianity as John Calvin (founder of the denomination of choice for the
Dickinson family) believed that upon death, the soul lives on and begins a period of stasis
where it lacks perceptive faculties. We do see the speaker (a soul) perceiving the world
around them in the poem but what shows conformity to Calvin is the way the poem ends,
with a dash. It is this dash that banishes any sense of cadential close and instead lets the
poem drift into oblivion as the soul loses perception, allowing us to assume the poem is the
speaker’s journey to Calvinist stasis upon death and so the creation of the chasm of life and
death.
Similarly, this chasm is also seen in ‘I Heard A Fly Buzz- When I Died-’ although, Dickinson in
her genius provokes this insight through a different pathway; “The Eyes around – had wrung
them dry – And Breaths were gathering firm…” This poem sees the speaker assume the first-
person point of view throughout the poem. This is interesting to note as in the quote
extracted from the poem, we see Dickinson create a similar sense of separation seen in ‘I
felt a Funeral, in my Brain.’ This is done by Dickinson, dehumanising the mourners, and
instead personifying and capitalising certain aspects of them such as their eyes and breaths.
The effect of this is an ‘us and them’ divide created between the dead speaker (we know
they have died from the past tense utilised in the opening line of the poem) and the
mourners. Another important insight can be drawn from Dickinson’s choice of aspects to
personify and capitalise as they demonstrate the new ‘art of mourning’ that became
prevalent in Civil War America. This change saw the romanticisation of mourning as a
brooding, reflective and upsetting time and established many cultural norms that have
persevered to the modern-day. An example of this is the association of crying women with
death. Due to patriarchal paradigms, women were commonly seen as more emotive than
men and so when the act of mourning was made fashionable by Queen Victoria this became
an image that has been associated with death and mourning ever since. This is just one
example of how death can be seen through many nuances in Emily Dickinson’s poetry that
offer insights and explorations of the poet’s own beliefs.
In addition, both poems are similar in the way they dismiss commonly held axioms that
surround death. In ‘I Heard A Fly Buzz- When I Died-’ the axiom that is dissolved is the
grandeur and coming of ‘the King,’ a metonymy used to refer to the Christian God; “For that
last Onset – when the King Be witnessed – in the Room-” Dickinson cleverly develops a tone
of expectancy through the caesura and superlative ‘last’ that together drive towards the
metonymy. This tone parallels the emotions felt by the speaker and translates them into the
mind of the reader. This tone is greatly contrasted later in the poem by the quote, “There
interposed a Fly-” which appears a lot plainer than the previous quote. The lexical choice of
the verb “imposed” shows the fly as a dominant presence and it is thought by many critics
such as Lyndal Gordon that the fly is the great arrival- not ‘the King’ that is expected. The
symbolism of the fly builds a sense of decay and inconvenience of death; a counter norm
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