Manual I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - : Shmoop Poetry Guide

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I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – Summary. The poem describes the scene and the atmosphere at the moment when someone dies, with a weird surprise.
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Dickinson gave up the chance to marry and have a family; in exchange, she had the independence, time, and solitude to devote herself to her writing. She was not an isolated and heartbroken eccentric, having enjoyed many correspondents and a dear relationship with her sister-in-law. Earlier critics have suggested that she published so few of her poems while she was alive because she had no intention of ever releasing them.

More recent scholarship suggests that Dickinson regarded herself as a serious poet and imagined an audience for her work beyond her primary reader, who was her sister-in-law. Dickinson was an avid reader and was well aware of the kinds of poetry popular in her day. She also knew, therefore, how little hers resembled it. Popular poetry of the time was sentimental and genteel. Not even the radical transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson , Henry David Thoreau , and others produced much poetry that looked or sounded new. In contrast, W.

Howells, writing in his W. Madsen Hardy has a doctorate in English literature and is a freelance writer and editor. At first glance, the poem may seem quite simple—a description of how, on the morning after a death, the living begin to confront the love they still feel for the departed.

However, it uses the unconventional metaphor of housework to describe the process of mourning. Dickinson was singularly fascinated with death, both the experience of dying itself, and how loss is experienced among the living. Death is one of the most prominent themes in her large body of work. But it also reflects the fact that death was far more closely woven into the texture of everyday life in the mid-nineteenth-century when Dickinson wrote than it is today. Because antibiotics had not yet been discovered, people frequently died from sicknesses that we now consider mild.

Death in childbirth and early childhood were common. Furthermore, less medical intervention was available at each stage of physical decline. Death was an experience that was closer at hand for Dickinson and her contemporaries than it is for most Americans today—an experience associated with, rather than divorced from, the intimate setting of home.

Dickinson juxtaposes the great theological concepts of mortality and eternity with a mundane detail from daily life. Home thus reflects her inner landscape … a sensitivity to space dependent on both personal and social factors.

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Death poses difficult philosophical questions for all who contemplate it. However, Dickinson was in critical dialogue with the dominant ideas of death circulating in her day. Her poetry is steeped in Protestant theology and the rhythm of Protestant hymns. But Dickinson sets her poetic vision of death against the religious doctrine representing God in authoritative, impersonal, and patriarchal male authority terms that she would. Another culturally dominant understanding of death to which Dickinson responded in her poetry was derived from sentimental literature—a form of fiction and poetry that was wildly popular in the nineteenth century.

Popular sentimental literature was predominantly written by women from whom Dickinson was eager to distinguish herself. Bustle is the somewhat trivial action that is associated with the many small necessities of everyday life, necessities that do not cease for the living even when a death has just taken place. The poem is filled with similar contrasts.

In the second stanza, Dickinson extends her central metaphor.

Mother to Son Analysis - Literary devices and Poetic devices

Rather, she uses such activity to symbolize the internal, emotional activity of mourning. For Dickinson—who lived an adventuresome life of the mind between the same four walls of the house where she was born—home is, foremost, a metaphor for the self. Homes and houses in her poetry represent different dimensions of selfhood-consciousness, the mind, imagination, and spirit. In the poem death is simultaneously an intimately familiar event and one of awesome mystery. What is familiar and home-like is the love of the deceased that the living carry with them.

Eternity is, by definition, not-home, a radically other and unknown place.

Dickinson considered the speaker in her poems to be

Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton teaches American literature and directs the writing center at a college in Texas. These activities, which include sweeping, dusting and other household labors, have been overlooked for a couple of reasons. First, early critics belonging to the male literary establishment would have read her use of domestic imagery as an indicator of her femininity and reclusiveness.

More recent critics, primarily feminists, however, understand her use of domestic imagery in more subtle ways. Where one expects the sublime, she offers the mundane. Instead of grand passion, she delivers quiet rumination. In both of these poems, for example, the finality of death is set against the insistent cycle of housework.

Dickinson uses the image of housework to suggest ways that humans can stem the tide of decay that death signifies. The routine labors of tending to the house and family, Dickinson suggests, anchors women and keeps them from despair. The first stanza wonders how many times has this humble woman failed or stumbled under the burden of all the work she has to do. No one else knows because no one else paid attention. The housework, like the woman, was invisible. In the second stanza the poem insists that the woman be seen and touched.

It reminds observers that her now cold forehead was frequently hot with exertion or fever, and it dares those present to touch her hair and handle her fingers. Flies buzz, the sun shows off the proudly speckled window, and cobwebs fear no retribution. Dickinson uses housework to signify two things. What if, she seems to say, the forces of entropy—represented by cobwebs and fingerprints—have always been in sympathy with the housewife? The Bustle in a House also takes housework and death as its subject.

In this poem, Dickinson describes the escalation of activity in a household where someone has just died. In this poem, however, the housewife is absent. The second stanza continues to focus on the act and not the person doing it. But the poem strains against its own imagery and invites readers to reconsider housework as much as it illuminates the cyclical nature of death and grief.

The result is a poem that uses housework as a metaphor, but which also distances itself from the work itself and she who would do it. This attitude toward housework reflects what we know about Dickinson herself, who often expressed resentment at the feminization and futility of domestic duty. Because she never married, Dickinson was able to give to her art much of the time and energy she would have been compelled to devote to sweeping and putting away if she had had a family.

But metaphors work both ways, illuminating and complicating both terms in the pair. For Dickinson, who used domestic imagery in so many poems, housework was no minor annoyance. It represented the entire complex of social and economic constraints under which women labored and which both literally and figuratively deprived them of intellectual and artistic opportunity. Lake holds an MA in English and is a poet residing in California. As with some prejudice, there is at least some basis for making these complaints.

Dickinson was at once fascinated with and appalled by death. As much as she longed for the comfort of traditional Christian belief or Romantic pantheist mysticism, she found she lacked the ability to believe with simple faith in either. She was, in other words, the consummate nineteenth century agnostic. But she still struggled ceaselessly with the ultimate contradiction death seemed to pose to life. And she was also a keen student of human behavior, having observed death and dying and their effects on all concerned many times first-hand. She can conjure up an entire scene with a single noun and tell a whole story in a mere phrase.

In fact, her work is highly prized for its crystalline compactness in Japan, where haiku reigns supreme. Even in translation, her poetry comes across as almost native to the Japanese. There are absolutely no wasted words in this short poem! Each reveals the depths of an emotional experience that we who live in the twenty-first century seldom encounter.

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –

It is a poetic achievement that in many ways anticipates Imagism and other modern poetic movements because of its use of single words and phrases to tell its story through pictures that reveal so much about the human condition with an economy of language. But according to thanatologists, the psychologists who study the phenomena of death and dying, denial is usually the first of many stages in the grieving process in most cultures anyway. It is logical, then, that retreat into the everyday details of domestic life would be, especially for women of that era, the safest place to hide from the pain of losing a loved one.

But as an industrious effort performed in dedication to the dead, this particular housework reveals an assiduity that approaches spiritual devotion. In sweeping up the ashes of the fireplace, the grieving one is actually sweeping up the pieces of her burnt out and broken heart. There is no reason to believe, however, that the grieving will stop at this stage and not proceed further towards healing. Many readers, as mentioned above, find her syntactical deletions and obtuse style confusing. Howells, W.


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Howells as Critic , Edited by Edwin H. Blake and Carlton F. Regardless, the poem documents the way that poetry attempts to translate the broader mysteries of nature into language and communicate them to other people. Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem.