Fly

Question 1

What

Answer 1

“”” a speaker seemingly recounts their own death and the vigil preceding it with Dickinson once more engaging with death rituals and inscrutability.

Question 2

C1
‘I Heard a Fly buzz - when I died’

Answer 2

•Caesura - juxtaposes:
-life + death
-noise + silence
-profundity + mundanity
•Onomatopoeia + trochaic stress:
-evokes disorder of fly, disturbs solemnity of Puritan GD ritual

Question 3

C1
‘stillness.. was like the stillness in the Air / Between the Heaves of Storm’

Answer 3

•Metaphor + long vowel sounds
-life + afterlife = intense storms, twin dramas of life, accentuated by long vowels. death = stable point in between
•Repetition
-stillness + quietness of room = tense, solemnity of conventional GD ritual, anticipating of death.
-stillness = charged w. anticipation of afterlife.
-tension demonstrated by repetition + simile = compare silent tension of room to eye of a storm.

Question 4

C1
‘The Eyes around — had wrung them dry’

Answer 4

•Synecdoche
-‘eyes’ = mourners (like in TK)
-implied to have waited for speaker’s death for awhile.
-‘wrung dry’ = both sincerity of mourning but also performativity of spectatorship of vigil - by inauthentic conforming to expectations of Ars Moriendi to ensure GD of speaker.

Question 5

C1
‘Breaths were gathering firm for the last onset’
‘The King + Be witnessed’

Answer 5

•Adjective
-‘firm’ = mourner’s strained breathing, anticipation of death = palpable
•Oxymoron
-speaker’s Christian confidence that death = ‘last’ beginning (immortality’s arrival)
•Allusion + imperial diction
-Divine election = imminent (King = God)

Question 6

C2
‘signed away/What portion of me be/Assignable.’

Answer 6

•Word choices
- speaker shows reassuring preparedness for death by ‘signing away’ possessions in will; what proportion indicates belief in immortal, intangible soul reserved for God.

Question 7

‘then it was/There interposed a Fly’
+
‘Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz-‘

Answer 7

•Cacophonous verb + caesura
-evokes fly’s obnoxious interruption + speaker’s failure to maintain focus on divine ‘light’
- may indicate ED’s questioning of Puritan GD rituals to provide certainty + comfort in death
•Synaesthesia
-senses distorting, consciousness collapsing

Question 8

C2
‘I could not see to see-‘

Answer 8

•Full rhyme
-death arrive b/c sight withdrawn / apparent absoluteness of death underscored by full rhyme
•Diacope
-may indicate that in death, the dead lose sensory capacity to express the ‘truth’ of death
-OR emergence of some new unseeing self after death

Question 9

C2
fly as the metaphor

Answer 9

•Compressed metaphor
- human life = insignificant, banal, pedestrian (like fly) OR putrefaction of death OR as an obscurer of vision, fly represent fact that humanity’s understanding of death is always occluded

Question 10

Contour 1

Answer 10

S1 + S2 begin jarringly, locates banal fly amidst more solemn of settings: a deathbed vigil in which ED seems to portray the conventions of the Puritan GD as providing some control over death’s unknowability.
Room is charged with the expectation of the speaker’s imminent death and election (the King) which seems to rehearse the speaker’s (and possibly ED’s) faith in Christian resurrection.
1st stanza introduces poem’s chief juxtapositions between life and death, noise and silence, and profundity and mundanity.

Question 11

Contour 2

Answer 11

The final stanza sees the return of the fly which intrudes upon the solemnity of the GD rituals which, up until this point, have bestowed a degree of control over death’s inevitability and mystery.
ED uses the fly as a bathetic reminder that neither ritual nor ceremony (nor promise of afterlife) can deny the fact death is mundane, abject and tenaciously unknowable.