Insights on Death in I’ve Seen a Dying Eye

"I’ve Seen a Dying Eye," by Emily Dickinson, is a poem about the nature of death. A sense of uncertainty and uncontrollability about death seems to exist. The observer’s speech seems hesitant and unsure of what he or she is seeing, partly because of the dashes, but also because of the words used to describe the scene. As the eye is observed looking for something, then becoming cloudy and progressing through more obscurity until it finally comes to rest, the person observing the death cannot provide any definite proof that what the dying person saw was hopeful or disturbing. The dying person seems to have no control over the clouds covering his or her eye, which is frantically searching for something that it can only hope to find before the clouds totally consume it. Death, as an uncontrollable force, seems to sweep over the dying. More importantly, as the poem is from the point of view of the observer, whether the dying person saw anything or not is not as significant as what the observer, and the reader, carry away from the poem. The suspicion of whether the dying person saw anything or had any control over his or her death is what is being played on in the poem. If the dying person has no control, what kind of power does that give death? Did the eye find what it was looking for before the clouds billowed across their vision, and was it hopeful? These questions represent the main idea the poem is trying to convey. Death forces itself upon the dying leaving them no control, and if something hopeful exists to be seen after death, it is a question left for the living to ponder.

The idea that something exists after death is uncertain in this poem, saying this, it is important that the point of view is that of the observer. The ...

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... is now blessed because he or she finally knows the answer to the life-long question. It seems that Dickinson purposefully leaves the poem open-ended to keep that uncertainty alive in her poem. The only time the uncertainty of death is made certain is during that moment when our eyes begin their search through the engulfing clouds.

Emily never gives an absolute definition of what she is addressing in this poem and in every other poem she wrote. Michael Myers, author of Thinking and Writing About Literature, best captures this idea of open-ended conclusions says:

It's also worth keeping in mind that Dickinson was not always consistent in her views and they can change from poems, to poem, depending upon how she felt at a given moment. Dickinson was less interested in absolute answers to questions than she was in examining and exploring their "circumference."