Johns Hopkins UP.
John Crowe Ransom
And since this was a strange poet, I shall begin with two of the
stranger poems; they deal with Death, but they are not from the elegiac poems about
suffering the death of others, they are previsions of her own death. In neither does Death
present himself as absolute in some brutal majesty, nor in the role of God’s dreadful
minister. The transaction is homely and easy, for the poet has complete sophistication in
these matters, having attended upon deathbeds, and knowing that the terror of the event is
mostly for the observers. In the first poem (# 465) a sort of comic or Gothic relief
interposes, by one of those homely inconsequences which may be observed in fact to attend
even upon desperate human occasions.
The other poem (#712) is a more imaginative creation. It is a single sustained
metaphor, all of it analogue or "vehicle" as we call it nowadays, though the
character called Death in the vehicle would have borne the same name in the real situation
or "tenor." Death’s victim now is the shy spinster, so he presents himself as a
decent civil functionary making a call upon a lady to take her for a drive.
From "Emily Dickinson: A Poet Restored," in Perspectives USA (1956)
Copyright ? 1956 by John Crowe Ransom.
Paula Bennett
Like many people in her period, Dickinson was
fascinated by death-bed scenes. How, she asked various correspondents, did this or that
person die? In particular, she wanted to know if their deaths revealed any information
about the nature of the afterlife. In this poem, however, she imagines her own death-bed
scene, and the answer she provides is grim, as grim (and, at the same time, as ironically
mocking), as anything she ever wrote.
In the narrowing focus of death, the fly’s insignificant buzz, magnified tenfold by the
stillness in the room, is all that the speaker hears. This kind of distortion in scale is
common. It is one of the ‘illusions’ of perception. But here it is horrifying because it
defeats every expectation we have. Death is supposed to be an experience of awe. It is the
moment when the soul, departing the body, is taken up by God. Hence the watchers at the
bedside wait for the moment when the ‘King’ (whether God or death) ‘be witnessed’ in the
room. And hence the speaker assigns away everything but that which she expects God (her
soul) or death (her body) to take.
What arrives instead, however, is neither God nor death but a fly, ‘[w]ith
Blue—uncertain–stumbling Buzz,’ a fly, that is, no more secure, no more sure, than
we are. Dickinson had associated flies with death once before in the exquisite lament,
‘How many times these low feet/staggered.’ In this poem, they buzz ‘on the/ chamber
window,’ and speckle it with dirt (# 187, F, 152), reminding us that the housewife, who
once protected us from such intrusions, will protect us no longer. Their presence is
threatening but only in a minor way, ‘dull’ like themselves. They are a background noise
we do not have to deal with yet.
In ‘I heard a Fly buzz,’ on the other hand, there is only one fly and its buzz is not
only foregrounded. Before the poem is over, the buzz takes up the entire field of
perception, coming between the speaker and the ‘light’ (of day, of life, of knowledge). It
is then that the ‘Windows’ (the eyes that are the windows of the soul as well as,
metonymically, the light that passes through the panes of glass) ‘fail’ and the speaker is
left in darkness–in death, in ignorance. She cannot ’see’ to ’see’ (understand).
Given that the only sure thing we know about ‘life after death’ is that flies–in their
adult form and more particularly, as maggots–devour us, the poem is at the very least a
grim joke. In projecting her death-bed scene, Dickinson confronts her ignorance and gives
back the only answer human knowledge can with any certainty give. While we may hope for an
afterlife, no one, not even the dying, can prove it exists.
Like ‘Four Trees–upon a solitary/Acre, ‘ ‘I heard a Fly buzz’ represents an extreme
position. I believe that to Dickinson it was a position that reduced human life to too
elementary and meaningless a level. Abdicating belief, cutting off God’s hand, as in ‘I
heard a Fly buzz’ (a poem that tests precisely this situation), leaves us with nothing.
Not just God, but we ourselves are reduced–a fact that has become painfully evident in
twentieth-century literature. . . .
From Emily Dickinson, Woman Poet. Copyright ? 1990 by Paulk Bennett. Reprinted
by permission of the author.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff
Throughout, the "eye /I" of the speaker struggles to retain power.
Ironically, although the final, haunting sentence has to do with sight, "I could not
see to see–," at no time in the course of the poem can the speaker maintain an
ordered visual grasp of the world. "The Ear is the last Face," Dickinson wrote
to Higginson. We hear after we see." Thus is it in this work. We begin this poem
about seeing—with sound.
In the first stanza, the "I" can still assert straightforward utterances of
fact in a comprehensive manner; however, the faculty of sight has already begun to slip
away. In the following stanza, "Eyes" belong only to others—ghostly,
anonymous presences gathered to attest to God’s action. The speaker no longer retains
either an autonomous "I" or the physical power of eyesight. A volitional self is
recollected in stanza three, but the memory is one of relinquishment, the execution of the
speaker’s last "will" and testament. Indeed, one element of the
poem’s bitter contrast is concentrated in the juxtaposition of the ruthless will of
the Deity, Who determines fate, and the speaker’s "will"—reduced by
now to the legal document that has been designed to restore order in the aftermath of
dissolution. And at this moment of double "execution," when tacit
acknowledgement of God’s ineluctable force is rendered, identity begins to fritter
away. The speaker formulates thought in increasingly strained synecdochic and metonymical
tropes. The possessions of the dying Voice are designated as the "portions of me
[that] be / Assignable–," not as discrete objects that belong to someone and are
separate from her, but as blurred extensions of a fraying self that can no longer define
the limits of identity. The "uncertain" quality that inheres in the
speaker’s eyesight is assigned to the "stumbling Buzz" of the fly; it is
the speaker’s faculties that have "failed," but in the verse, the speaker
attributes failure to the "Windows." The confusions inherent in this rhetorical
finale of the poem aptly render the atomizing self as the stately centrifugal force of
dissolution begins to scatter being and consciousness.
Like many other proleptic poems, "I heard a Fly buzz—" serves
several functions. It does provide a means of "Looking at Death"; in addition,
however, it strives to define both death and life in unaccustomed ways. Thus it is
centrally concerned to posit "seeing" as a form of power: "to see" is
to assert authority and autonomy—the authority to define life in ways that will be
meaningful not only to oneself, perhaps, but to other as well, and autonomy to reject the
criteria and limits God would force upon us, even if such an act will inevitably elicit
God’s wrath. Death robs us of all bodily sensations; more important, however, it
wrests this autonomous authority from us, the final and most devastating wound, "I
could not see to see–." Ironically, the strategy of the poem mimics
God’s method, for a reader is enabled to comprehend the value of "sight"
here principally by experiencing the horror of its loss. Moreover, the poem even suggest
that some ways of engaging with the world during "life" may be no more than
forms of animated death. Eating, sleeping, exercising the physical faculties—these
alone do not describe "life"; and many pass through existence with a form of
"blindness" that fatally compromises the integrity of self. Thus the poem offer
a counsel to the living by strongly implying the crucial importance of daring "to
see" while life still lasts, and one way in which the poet can be Representative is
by offering a model of active insight that is susceptible of emulation.
From Emily Dickinson. Copyright ? 1988 by Cynthia Wolff.
Claudia Yukman
Not only does the frame of the conversion narrative enable us to
categorize a great number of Dickinson’s poems, it also provides insight into some of her
most formally singular narrative poems, namely, those in which a subject addresses us from
beyond the grave. Our unbounded subjectivity can only be perceptible at moments of extreme
crises that exceed systems of
explanation and semiotic codes. Birth would be one such extreme, but since an infant does
not have the dual persepective
language gives, perhaps the most primal scene at which the duality between our socially
constructed selves and our embodiment can actually be witnessed or narrated is death. In
"I heard a Fly buzz — when I died," Dickinson employs the Christian narrative
model, with its particular eschatological frame of experience, to tell of a deathwatch
such as I have cited above, but her narrative fails to produce the reality that the
Christian narrative represents.
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died —
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air —
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around — had wrung them dry —
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset — when the King
Be witnessed — in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes–Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable — and then it was
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 –
The narrative that creates this drama is about "that last Onset –
when the King / Be witnessed — in the Room — ." For the
witnesses in the room, the dying speaker’s countenance and her last words will necessarily
represent either Christ’s presence or
absence. The subject’s life might be described as a narrative life; in other words, the
subject has become the object of a narrative, her subjectivity reduced to the portion of a
life that can be narrated as the story of Christ’s coming.
The authoritative "sense of an ending" created by the prior narrative (the
second coming) is reflected in the secular ritual
of redistributing one’s property before death as well as by the religious ritual of the
deathwatch. Both institutions recognize a
dualistic self. The speaker of this poem knows herself through the narrative version of
identity as "portions assignable" (material,
bodily) and unassignable (unknown, soul). In effect, by writing a will she divides herself
from earthly life. As the text of a dualistic self the will reflects back to its author
the difference between bodily and spiritual life. Once the will is written, the
author is past writing and this earthly life. The remainder of life is lived in an
inferential space between a body and soul at least
provisionally identified with sensory perception.
The account of this scene, which I have just given, might have been told by anyone in the
room, even before entering the
room, because the Christian narrative precedes and formulates the experience of this
community of witnesses. But with the
intervention of the fly, the point of view can only be that of the subject of the
enounced. In her experience the narrative frame
breaks down. The random presence of the fly usurps the place of the king; the unexpected,
meaningless event, seen within the
narrative frame, becomes the significant event. The random significance of the fly thus
points to the random significance of the
narrative frame itself. The fly prevents the speaker from seeing the light; it distracts
her from the appropriate (Christian) sense of
an ending. But the fly is only an externalized form of the fact that the body of the
speaker itself interrupted the narrative, as the
speaker experienced from within her body what there was in the room beyond the narrative.
The body, it turns out, like the
soul, is a portion of the self that cannot be signed away. In fact, while the thoughts of
the people in the room have been
organized by the Christian narrative, unreferenced bodily presence has also pervaded the
room: the anonymous, plural "Eyes"
and "Breaths."
Given the two competing frames of experience, the Christian narrative and the body, there
arises an ambiguity in the last
line of this poem, which can be formulated as two questions: was there more to see — a
world beyond experience — and, how
is it that the speaker keeps speaking after she claims she "could not see,"
presumably meaning she died, since she goes on to
say "to see" again? This second "to see" repeats the gesture of the
entire poem; it exceeds the limits of narratability itself — to
represent a speaker who speaks after death.
The body as self or as object in relation to God cannot serve as a sign of God’s presence
because the individual’s experience of being embodied has become its own reality — a sign
of itself. The experience of being embodied has lost its referent; subjectivity is only
articulated as bodily presence. Dickinson is writing about the unreferencing of the body
from forms of subjectivity other than itself. This daring gesture figuratively places
experience before meaning and language as sign before language as signifier, but in doing
so it also attempts to realize through representation a more radical shift: it embodies
the self
before constructing that embodiment. While I would hasten to add that the body is
functioning as a sign rather than some essential body, it is not functioning as a sign
within the system of signs that is the Christian narrative.
The Christian narrative recognizes a self that has a body and a soul. Dickinson’s text
recognizes a subjectivity that cannot
be split into this dichotomy. Like the body, the text must register presence and the
gesture of writing, but it need not delimit
either. The question for interpretation is what is it to be alive (as symbolized by the
fly) rather than what is the meaning of being
alive (as symbolized by the King). "I heard a fly buzz when I died" is told
after death, where there can be no writing according
to the Christian narrative’s frame of experience. If it does not tell us what happened
after death, constricted as it is by its
relationship to the prior narrative, the poem nonetheless, as a text, exists beyond the
death in exactly the eschatological space
the Christian narrative invents.
In many of her narrative poems situated around a death, Dickinson distinguishes the
Christian representation of death from the sensations she experiences as a witness of
death (and we experience as readers). These distinctive poems are situated at the scene of
death neither because Dickinson has any peculiar fascination for death, nor simply because
she is using stock conventions also to be found in the poetry of her contemporaries.
Dickinson uses the convention of the deathwatch as a way to
consider the self at a moment when its culturally-assigned significance is weakest, and
she does so in order to escape the Christian narrative frame.
[. . . .]
The object status of a subject within a narrative is dramatically played out in
Dickinson’s frequently discussed poem, "My
Life had stood — a Loaded Gun — ." In this poem the subject fears the permanence of
the text as much as death, or rather,
fears the overdetermination of her subjectivity by the text more than "the power to
die."
from "Breaking the Eschatological Frame: Dickinson’s Narrative
Acts" Emily Dickinson Journal Vol. 1, No.1, 1992. Online Source: http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/I.1.Yukman.html