Essay
Analysing 'I heard a Fly buzz - when I died'
Analysing 'I heard a Fly buzz - when I died' by Emily Dickinson, an A grade exam style answer.
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‘I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -’Explore how Emily Dickinson presents feelings and attitudes about death/the afterlife in ‘I heard a Fly
buzz - when I died -’ and make connections with one or two other poems from your collection.
You should consider Dickinson’s use of poetic and stylistic techniques and significant literary or other
relevant contexts.
In ‘I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -’ a voice from beyond the grave recalls its dying moments.
In the first line of ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died’, Dickinson uses incongruity in a similarly
arresting way, this time in the mismatch between the momentous event denoted by ‘died’ and the
mundane, insignificant detail of a house fly. The onomatopoeic verb ‘buzz’ invites a stress on the
fifth syllable, breaking up the tetrameter, and making the sound of the fly seem insistent and
disruptive. This crucial detail of the fly gives the account some of the feel of a humorous anecdote.
The caesura created by the dash makes the subordinate clause ‘when I died’ feel like an
afterthought, yet it is the most confounding aspect of the poem: it promises the reader a glimpse of
the afterlife, suggesting at the very least that it is a position from which a story can be told.
‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died’ uses verb tense to play with narrative perspective. The first line
turns out to provide only the abstract for an anecdote. Instead of revealing what came after the
death, lines 2–11 move the narrative back in time: we are given an atmospheric description of the
deathbed scene, and earlier actions as the relatives cry and the speaker signs her will. As we get
back to the moment at which the fly intrudes, the poem ends with ‘The windows failed / And I could
not see to see –’ The only action after the buzzing is death itself. A sense of departure from life is
created by what the speaker can and can’t see: just as the sun set in ‘Because I could not stop’, so
here the light disappears with the verb ‘failed’. The afterlife suggested by the final line in ‘I heard a
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