I heard a Fly buzz — when I died

The Fly possesses a rich cultural and scientific history. Because of 19th-century educational trends and Dickinson’s intellectually curious nature, readers can safely assume she had a passing knowledge of the symbolic weight behind her decision to use a fly.

In Western symbiotics and mythologies, the Fly frequently represents dread, panic, suffering, and malice. Dickinson, who read and re-read the King James Bible, would have been familiar with both the plague of flies on the Egyptians in Exodus and the demonic Lord of the Flies Beelzebub. Premodern creators called upon these connections in both visual art and theater. Shakespeare, calling it a breese, showed that the Fly’s small, annoying bites intensify over time, halting progress and stymying plans. In Troilus and Cressida, the character of Nestor says a herd of cows receives more damage from flies than from large predators like tigers. Shakespeare echoes and elevates this annoyance in Antony and Cleopatra when Cleopatra’s navy retreats like “the breese upon her, like a cow in June” (Miller, David. “SHAKESPEAREAN ENTOMOLOGY.” TUATARA, vol. 1, no. 2, May 1948, pp. 11-12). In these lines, the Fly transfigures into a force of termination and misfortune. Its appearance disrupts and disturbs. Readers can trace the image of flies as harbingers of suffering back as far as ancient Greece. In Greek playwright Aeschylus’s “Prometheus Bound,” Hera commands a fly to “prick…stab” at the hide of cow-transformed Io in retribution for Hera’s husband Zeus’s interest in Io (Aeschylus. “Prometheus Bound.” The Internet Classics Archive | Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, 2009).

Through this framework, Dickinson’s Fly points to the speaker’s lingering yet veiled anxiety about the reality of the afterlife and the nature of death. The speaker does not give the reader any specific details about her mourners and will. She only reveals that other people are present and that she settled her will. By leaving the speaker’s life tangible and hazy, Dickinson creates an illusion of a person at peace with their death and no longer bound by earthly attachments. Dickinson appears to conform with her era’s ideas of the Good Death. In order to fulfill the Good Death, the dying person must “remain calm, courageous, even stoic” (DeGrasse 8). The speaker does not interact with her mourners in the text. However, her address to the audience could fulfill the requirement for the dying to give wisdom and insight to the still living. However, the Fly’s presence troubles the Good Death. Instead of hearing goodbyes and parting words, the fly buzzes. Even the mourners have fallen quiet in Stanza 2, their “Eyes [...] wrung […] dry— / And Breaths […] gathering firm.” The Fly cuts all personal connection, intercepting it in the opening line before we even learn the speaker is dying (“I heard a Fly buzz — When I died—” [Line 1]) and then cutting off any further information about the speaker or their keepsakes. Both lines use an em-dash in the middle to divide the Fly from the speaker’s personal experience. This technique visualizes the Fly as an interruption and distraction from the supposed peace of the deathbed. The Fly’s return to the poem functions as a hinge, opening to the speaker’s impaired vision. If Dickinson follows in a religious-literary tradition, the Fly could represent the speaker’s subconscious turbulent dread and uncertainty about her fate after death, which prevents her from participating in the Good Death. Alternatively, the Fly could be the confirmed absence of God as a sign of the speaker’s damnation.

Beyond the metaphysical and cultural meanings, it is vital to consider the scientific debates and material realities when discussing Dickinson’s Fly. At Mount Holyoke, Dickinson “was exposed to cutting edge science” thanks to seminary founder Mary Lyon, a trained chemist (“A Chemical Conviction: Emily Dickinson and Science.” A Chemical Conviction: Emily Dickinson and Science | In the Classroom | Amherst College, Amherst College, 11 Nov. 2012).

Dickinson listed physiology, chemistry, and algebra among her studies. Even after completing her formal studies, Dickinson stayed devoted to botany and reading about the world through The Atlantic and The Springfield Republican newspaper. As a result, Dickinson had a fair chance at being aware of the Spontaneous Generation debate.

Dating back to approximately 2nd Century BCE, the theory of spontaneous generation proposed that inanimate or decaying matter produced life. Thinkers like Aristotle used this theory to explain why maggots appeared on rotten meat and corpses.

However, Italian scientist Francesco Redi challenged spontaneous generation in 1669. His experiments found that maggots only formed on meat if flies had access to it. Although some scientists like John Needham continued to support the spontaneous generation theory, French scientist Louie Pasteur officially disproved it in 1859 using swan-necked flasks.

Applying a biological lens to “I heard a Fly Buzz — when I died” adds an interesting dimension. A Redi-Pasteur reading generates a feeling that the speaker fears the Fly as it represents the inevitable life cycle (Lines 1, 11-16). The Fly symbolizes death enacting its will on her. Once consciousness leaves her body, the Fly will lay its eggs, and from those eggs, life will move on without her. This concept might have been terrifying for a deeply familial woman preoccupied with the relationship between the body and spirit. A Redi-Pasteur reading might also point to a lack of God and the inseparability of body and soul since “only life can produce life.” Using the debunked spontaneous generation theory lens, the concept of maggots suddenly manifesting on the body could point to more concrete proof of the afterlife. It promotes the idea that the intangible can be wrapped in flesh. Thus, the tangible may become intangible again.

Of course, one does not exactly need knowledge of life moving on past one’s death and death’s arrival to understand the Fly. Critic Clarence L. Gohdes points out that flies were frequent household guests “in the days before window screens” (Gohdes, Clarence L. “Emily Dickinson’s Blue Fly.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 3, New England Quarterly, Inc., 1978, p. 425).

Even before the mass death caused by the Civil War, death was a more frequent life occurrence than today. “She transmits the sensations which she imagines she might feel during the last moments before death,” said critic Thomas Johnson. “The buzzing fly, so familiar a part of the natural order of persistent household discomforts, is brought in at last to give the touch of petty irritabilities that are concomitant with the living—and indeed—with dying” (Gohdes 430).

Dickinson twists the banal, the mundane, the expected into the disturbing, asking her readers to re-evaluate their ideas about dying. The speaker may not know where she is going, but the Fly will stay in the room for a while longer than she.