Emily Dickinson`s 465
Emily Dickinson in her poem #465, covers the
subject of death in a way that I
have not seen before. She delves right into
the last sounds she heard when the
narrator died, which was a fly buzzing.
The last actions of this world are
concluded by the assigning of "keepsakes",
the last few tears while
waiting "the King". And now, in the midst of this
silence, Emily
chooses to introduce the buzzing of a fly. This common
household pest's
incessant buzz becomes all the dying can hear. The fly is a
significant part of
the poem and in this essay, I will give examples as to
why and how. I think the
fly has special significance in the poem. Beelzebub
was often portrayed as a
fly: Lord of the Flies, and there is a strange tone
about this poem, as though
the dying person is a controller, an organizer, a
cold person in fact, her last
steps towards death were so calculated, "The
Eyes around-had wrung them
dry-/And Breaths were Gathering firm/ for the last
Onset-when the King/Be
witnessed-in the Room."(ln 5-8). She is waiting for
King (God) to come and
take her to the after life. She has calculated death,
then this pest"interposes" itself , "Between the light and me"(ln14) her
peaceful
transition to heaven was interrupted. The fly suddenly opens up the
possibility
that all is not about to proceed as expected, even after death.
And the fact
that this is also a posthumously written poem, "when I died,"(ln
1) suggests
that there's some cause for the dying person not to be resting
peacefully in
heaven. Something went wrong, something "interposed" between
'the light' (a
symbol of heaven) and herself. More than anything this poem is
about the
uninvited in our lives, it also has echoes of 'the fly in the
Vaseline', the
thing that always goes wrong. The death is planned out, the
will is taken care
of, and then the nasty fly joins her and destroys her
peaceful death with its
bothersome buzz. That buzz could be the unconfessed
sins she hidden from god,
but what ever it is, it has a profound affect on
her afterlife by leaving her
with this incessant buzzing. The room of the
dying is haunted by an
uncomfortable, daunting "Silence". The comparison of
this quiet to the
"the stillness in the Air between the heaves of
storm"(ln4)
intensifies the feeling of anticipation for some frightening
event. If you are
out jogging in the summer and you start to see dark storm
clouds looming
overhead, there is a panic that comes, you could get caught in
the storm. The
clouds as beautiful as they may seem while inside, as soon as
the storm begins,
they let loose their power. I think the implied author is
entering, in
imagination; the very moment of death here is darkness itself.
Which is why this
poem is, for me, so chilling. So many of the poems insist
on a life after death,
a spiritual reawakening. But this poem ends on a note
of obliteration and
overwhelming darkness, accompanied only by the sound of
the buzzing. The fly is
also a symbol of decay and dissolution, and even of
disease, and contamination.
It's a brilliant idea, a common household
pest, and also a powerful symbol of
evil, uninvited and distracting. This
image of distraction is particularly
noticeable, especially on first reading
the poem. Everything's going so much
according to plan it's as though these
people are on a stage reading their
script, going through pre-conceived
motions. And then suddenly there's the
gatecrasher, the thing outside the
script that completely distracts the dying
person, and threatens to rob her
of her moment of vision.... "And then the
Windows failed - and then/ I
could not see to see -" (ln 15) makes it
doubly clear that the moment of
vision (windows/eyes failing) has been stolen
from her and that, in effect,
the fly has won by becoming the very last thing
the speaker hears, and
imagines - I think the fact that she sees it as "Blue
is not because she can
see it but because she is imagining it. The irritation
the fly introduces to
the scene also becomes her final experience of life, a
perfect example of how
something so ordinary, even trivial, can loom so terribly
large it can
overwhelm and completely blot out the spirituality. I somehow feel
that when
Emily Dickinson wrote this poem, she was in pessimistic mood, maybe
even
doubting the faith that normally sustained her. The language in the
poem,
though wonderfully precise and startlingly original, seems to me less
important
for a reader than the message' of the poem, which can be taken as a
wry comment
on how everything, even the privacy of death, can be ruined by
the commonest
thing, or as something as darkly symbolic as a vision of hell
itself. It leads
us to the unknown but then gently lets us down, refusing to
give us the
knowledge we want. The narrator, being no longer of this earth,
cannot view what
is to come through their earthly "windows". There is an
implied
argument that Dickinson wrote with an audience in mind, that she
deliberately
kept the ending open so as not to alienate her readers. The fact
that much of
the poem's power comes from such an open ending is, I believe,
almost
incidental. The whole point about the next life is that we do not know
and
cannot know what it is like or even if it exists. And that's what makes
life so
interesting. Think how boring it would be if we actually knew all the
answers!