I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died;
I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died; - fact Summary
First Printed 1891
This poem was first published posthumously in 1891 in Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series. It stages a concise deathbed scene in which the speaker describes the stillness before death, the gathered mourners, and the ritual of wills. A common housefly interrupts the anticipated spiritual or visionary climax, its blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz
coming between the speaker and light. The poem’s juxtaposition of ordinary detail and the moment of dying complicates expectations about transcendence and the consolations of faith.
I heard a fly buzz when I died; The stillness round my form Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of storm. The eyes beside had wrung them dry, And breaths were gathering sure For that last onset, when the king Be witnessed in his power. I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portion of me I Could make assignable,–and then There interposed a fly, With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, Between the light and me; And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see.
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