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 –
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
A woman is dying. The room is quiet. The mourners have cried themselves out. Everyone is waiting for the sacred moment: the arrival of something divine. What arrives is a fly. It buzzes between the speaker and the light, the windows fail, sight collapses into itself, and the poem ends. There is no King, no revelation, no afterlife. The most trivial creature in the natural world shows up where God was supposed to be, and the poem treats this as the last thing worth reporting.
Background
Composed around 1862 and first published posthumously in 1896 in the third series of Poems by Emily Dickinson. Like all of her work, it appeared after her death and in an edited form; modern editions restore the manuscript’s dashes and irregular capitalization. The text here follows the standard scholarly edition.
This is Dickinson’s other great deathbed poem, the companion and opposite of Because I could not stop for Death. That poem gives the speaker a courteous escort into eternity; this one gives her a fly. The two poems together mark the range of Dickinson’s thinking about death: she can imagine it as a carriage ride or as an insect blocking the light, and she does not choose between them. Both are told from beyond the grave. Only one of them finds anything on the other side.
Analysis and Themes
The poem builds an expectation, demolishes it with the smallest possible intruder, and then follows the speaker’s consciousness to the exact point where it goes out.
Where the King Was Supposed to Be
The first two stanzas set up a scene of solemn expectation. The room is still, the mourners have finished weeping, and “Breaths were gathering firm / For that last Onset – when the King / Be witnessed – in the Room.” The King is whatever sacred presence was supposed to arrive at the moment of death: God, Christ, an angel, the light at the end. The room is braced for it. Every detail in these stanzas (the stillness, the dried eyes, the gathered breaths) is staging a religious event.
The fly, when it arrives in stanza 3, takes the King’s place. The most trivial creature in the natural world substitutes for the most exalted figure in the theological world, and Dickinson does not explain or apologize for the swap. “There interposed a Fly” is all she says. The verb “interposed” is formally precise, almost legalistic (to interpose is to place between, to interrupt by inserting, as one might interpose an objection in court), which matches the legal vocabulary the speaker has just been using: “willed,” “Signed away,” “Assignable.” The fly files an objection in the proceedings of dying.
Blue, Uncertain, Stumbling
“With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –” is the poem’s strangest line and its most precise. Blue is a color. Buzz is a sound. Dickinson applies the visual to the auditory, and the synesthesia is not decorative: as consciousness fails, the senses merge. The speaker can no longer keep seeing and hearing in separate channels. Perception is breaking down into a single undifferentiated field, and “Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz” is what that breakdown sounds like from inside.
The fly comes “Between the light – and me.” Light is both literal (the window light in the room) and theological (the divine light, revelation, whatever truth was supposed to arrive at the deathbed). The fly blocks it. A clumsy insect stands between the dying person and transcendence, and the blocking is physical and metaphysical at once. The poem does not say whether the light was real or whether it would have revealed anything. The fly makes sure the speaker never finds out.
See to See
“And then the Windows failed – and then / I could not see to see –” The windows are the speaker’s eyes and the room’s actual windows, both at once. “Failed” is the right verb: not “closed” (which would imply choice), not “darkened” (which would describe atmosphere). Failed. A mechanical shutdown. Something that was supposed to work stopped working.
And then the final line: “I could not see to see.” Not “I could not see” (simple blindness). “I could not see TO see”: the purposive infinitive makes sight both the tool and the goal. She could not use seeing as a means to seeing. The instrument of perception has failed, and with it the capacity to perceive. The doubling of “see” creates a loop that collapses into itself, and the poem ends there, on a dash, in the moment when consciousness is watching itself go out. There is no afterlife. There is no next line. The King never comes. What comes after death, in this poem, is the end of the poem.
Form and Technique
Four quatrains in common meter, the hymn form Dickinson uses for nearly everything. Here the irony is specific: a deathbed scene that was supposed to be a religious moment (the King, the divine visitation) is written in the meter of church hymns. The form promises the sacred. The content delivers a fly.
The dashes in this poem create the fly’s rhythm: start, stop, start, stop. “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –” reads with the same erratic motion as a fly’s path across a room. In line 13, “With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –” the dashes separate each adjective so the fly’s qualities arrive one at a time, lurching, the way a fly actually moves. And the repeated “and then” in the final two lines (“And then the Windows failed – and then / I could not see to see”) creates a sequence that keeps going past where you would expect it to stop, imitating the last flickers of consciousness before they go out.
The rhymes follow Dickinson’s usual pattern: mostly slant (“Room”/”Storm,” “firm”/”Room”), with the only full rhyme (“me”/”see”) landing on the poem’s final moment of perception failing. The resolution of the sound comes at the dissolution of the sight. The poem’s ear and its eye go out at the same moment.
Notable Lines
Three lines where the poem does its real work.
There interposed a Fly –
Line 12
The fly arrives where the King was expected. “Interposed” is a legal verb doing theological work: the fly files an objection in the proceedings of dying.
With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –
Line 13
Color applied to sound. The senses are merging as consciousness fails. The dashes make each quality arrive separately, lurching, the way a fly moves.
I could not see to see –
Line 16
Sight fails itself. The doubled verb creates a loop that collapses into nothing. The poem ends on this line, and nothing follows.
Glossary
Three words carry more weight than they appear to.
Onset (line 7): an arrival, an attack, a beginning. Here it names the expected final moment, the arrival of the divine presence at the deathbed. The word’s military and medical overtones (the onset of battle, the onset of illness) give the sacred scene a harder edge.
Assignable (line 11): capable of being legally transferred to another person. “What portion of me be / Assignable” means whatever part of the speaker can be distributed as property. The implication: there is a portion that cannot be assigned, the self or soul, and that is the part the fly interrupts.
interposed (line 12): placed between, inserted as an interruption. A formal, almost legalistic verb: to interpose an objection is to interrupt proceedings. The fly does not merely appear; it interposes, blocking the space between the speaker and the light.
Related Poems
Three poems that belong next to this one:
- Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson: the companion deathbed poem. That one gives the speaker a courteous escort into eternity; this one gives her a fly. Same poet, same subject, opposite music.
- I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain by Emily Dickinson: the same phenomenon from a different angle, consciousness watching itself disintegrate, the mind as both witness and wreckage.
- Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats: another poem set in a room where a creature’s sound carries the speaker to the border of consciousness. Keats’s bird is beautiful and tempting; Dickinson’s fly is ugly and trivial. Same architecture, opposite creature.