Emily Dickinson Death Analysis

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Recommended: Emily Dickinson’s view on death

Nick Noland
Mr. Dingle
English 106
May 19th 2014

Death in Emily Dickinson's Works
Death is an extremely common recurring theme in poetry itself, let alone the conceptions of Emily Dickinson, whose take on death varies from poem to poem. Her view on the subject was common for puritans of the time though, as she interpreted the way in which someone died to signify the current state of his or her soul, a peaceful death meaning harmony with God, whereas a violent or agitated death would infer the opposite. She as an author often personified death under many different appearances, some polite and good, others inherently evil in appearance.
In her poem, I heard a fly buzz when I died, Death is clearly represented by the fly, whose presence right at the end of the speaker's life is disconcerting to say the least. The fly is the only noise the narrator hears during their final moments, for the people surrounding her had long exhausted their pools of sorrow, “The eyes beside had wrung them dry.“ Although the narrator seems to be dying peacefully, the fly invokes images of rotting and stinking, suggesting that it may not matter how one dies, the end result of their body is the same. The poem's title itself leads to some question, it is in the past-tense, suggesting the narrator is already dead, with this Dickinson is implying that death is never ending and could, to the deceased create, an eternity involving their final moments, for them to experience over and over. The fly being the last sound the narrator heard, would be the only thing they ever heard again in the suggested perpetual loop of their own death they are condemned to for eternity.
In contrast with the sinister implications about death of the previous poem, Because I coul...

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... to be heaven where the events of the world can be watched as they unfold, in another it may be replaying the final moments of your life over, and over again to the point where it would seem a normal person would be driven mad by repetitiveness, however in this madness one would suffer for it is death, it would remain there as the eternity they are doomed to suffer through forever. Her narrators are constantly depicting death in this dark way, which would imply that Dickinson herself regards death darkly, this could be explained by her own dark life as she lived a secluded life with little human interaction outside her family, while even among them interaction was almost non-existent, which could have lead to this ideological view on death. She regards death as an adversary that is unable to be escaped or overcome by the powers of life, due to the passage of time.

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