Some Things That Fly There Be - Analysis

A poem that refuses to mourn what moves

Dickinson’s central insistence is that not everything deserves (or even permits) an elegy. The poem divides the world into categories that feel obvious at first—things that fly, things that stay—and then quietly shows how each category defeats our usual rituals of explanation and grief. The speaker isn’t indifferent; she’s cautious. In three short stanzas she draws a boundary around what language can properly do, especially the language of mourning and the language of metaphysics.

Flight: Birds, Hours, and a comic seriousness

The first stanza bunches together Birds, Hours, and the Bumblebee, and the oddity of that list matters. A bird and a bumblebee are literal fliers; Hours is time made creaturely, as if the day itself has wings. That mixture gives the tone a clipped, wry brightness—Dickinson’s way of sounding simple while smuggling in an argument. For these fast, passing things, Of these no Elegy. An elegy would try to hold what is defined by motion. It would turn flight into a possession, a kept relic. The line reads like a rule, but also like restraint: the speaker refuses to sentimentalize what is meant to vanish and return, vanish and return.

What stays: grief as landscape, eternity as pressure

Then the poem pivots to the heavy nouns: Grief, Hills, Eternity. Staying is not presented as comfort. Grief is the first thing that stays—an emotional permanence that can feel geologic, as solid as Hills. And Eternity is not a heavenward promise here so much as a duration that can crush meaning. Yet the speaker’s response is startlingly firm: Nor this behooveth me. The old-fashioned phrasing carries a moral weight—this does not befit me, does not belong to my duties. The tension sharpens: we might expect elegy to fit grief and eternity better than birds and bees, but the speaker rejects that, too. Even the permanent is not necessarily speakable.

The turn: from categories to the unsayable resurrection

The final stanza breaks the neat division between flying and staying: There are that resting, rise. Now movement comes out of stillness; ascent comes from what looks like stoppage. The phrase resting hints at sleep, but also at death, and rise carries the faint voltage of resurrection without declaring it outright. This is the hinge of the poem: it’s no longer about what things do, but about the mind confronting a phenomenon that scrambles all categories. If something can rise from rest, then flight and staying are not opposites; they are phases of a mystery.

“Can I expound the skies?”: humility that sounds like revolt

The closing questions and exclamation deepen the poem’s quiet defiance. Can I expound the skies? is less a request for help than a recognition that explanation tends to flatten wonder into doctrine. The speaker won’t claim the authority to interpret the whole skies—a word that can mean literal atmosphere, fate, or the afterlife. And yet she ends not with peace but with a taut, almost irritated awe: How still the Riddle lies! The riddle is still—not solved, not speaking back—and that stillness echoes both kinds of staying: the staying of grief and the resting-before-rise she just named. The tone here is restrained but charged; the exclamation feels like a hand pulled back from a hot surface.

A sharper implication: maybe elegy is the wrong tool

If elegy is denied for what flies and for what stays, the poem quietly suggests that mourning itself might be a category error—an attempt to manage life’s motion and life’s permanence with one familiar script. The speaker can name Birds and Grief, but when faced with the possibility that the resting may rise, she won’t turn that into a consoling story. The riddle’s power, for Dickinson, may be precisely that it lies there—present, unsolved, and therefore honest.