I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died Literary Devices

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Recommended: The theme of death in poems

Student Answer:
Imagery in "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died", is easily overlooked and can be confusing. As the poems imagery is very subtle and without picking it apart, can be hard to understand. But within the description of certain key words, such as, the room, the eyes, and even the window-- you can start to tell the theme of the poem. Imagery helps convey Emily Dickinson's message by setting the theme to a dark, gloomy room. Imagery is very important to use in poems for it would be hard to decipher the mood or theme of the poem without it.

You can start to use the words I listed earlier to realize that the poem is actually about death. Now, that may seem obvious because of the name of the poem, but understand Emily Dickinson rarely titled her …show more content…

It was simply named "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" because it was the first line of the poem. But, the poem, from what I have come to understand, is about a funeral. Or well, a deathbed. The fly can be seen as literal, it's a fly, an annoying typical fly that is buzzing and stumbling across the room. It's mentioned in the begining of the poem but doesn't come back until the end. This is to make the reader almost forget about the fly completely. When Dickinson mentions "The eyes around" that tells us that there are other people in the room. The next line, described the eyes as "dry" and then says "And breaths were gathering firm" which is like saying the company around the dying person on the deathbed has cried, but have dried their tears and in my opinion, have accepted the death of the person. After that, she mentions a King coming into the room, which in this case, the king probably means a god. She then says she"willed her keepsakes", meaning she made a will and has prepared for her death. Then this is when the fly comes back into the poem and as she describes "blue - uncertain - stumbling buzz" is how any fly acts, but I believe she described it because she wanted to make

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