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OKAY. I'm still at work, but my boss is gone for the day, SO LET'S DO THIS THING BITCHES.

Quote: from Emily Dickinson at 2:37 am on Sep. 9, 2008

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,-and then
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.

So the first thing here is a bit of background, for people who may have been living in a cave and not known this. Emily Dickinson liked death. A lot. Most of her best known poems are about death in one form or another (my personal favorite is "Because I could not stop for Death"), which I'd think would tend to make her a favorite of the hopeful deep members of teenage society...you know, the ones who wear ridiculous amounts of black and think that they're so much more philosophical than the rest of the world because 99% of their crappy teenage poems involve death, pain, sorrow, roses and slashing/cutting/bleeding/insert other form of self mutilation here. The thing is, though, that I don't think Dickinson was so shallowly obsessed with death as much as she was fascinated by the nuances of it. What is it like to die? What does a person go through when they pass away? Is Death something to be feared or embraced? As seen in this poem and in many of her others, Dickinson believed the latter.

So let's get down into it. What strikes me most about this poem is the contrast between the silence of the room in which the narrator is dying and the buzz of the fly, and that theme of contrast lends itself to my personal interpretation, that Dickinson is saying that no matter what we do or how resigned we are to it, no matter how much we've accepted it, we can't control Death. It's out of our hands.

The narrator, I would guess, had probably been preparing for Death for a very long time. She's "willed [her] keepsakes, signed away what portion of [her she] could make assignable," which suggests that possibly she was dying of some long, lingering illness that had given her plenty of forewarning that Death was coming at some point in the near future. Her loved ones, too, have had the chance to prepare for the inevitability of her passing (see: second stanza), and it actually seems like Death has now become this holy thing which they are all about to witness, in sacred silence, to see God ("the king be witnessed in his power") come and take the narrator from life into the hereafter.

But despite all of this planning and despite her desire, it would seem, to have her Death be an Event in which people are quiet, contemplative and sacred, a fly buzzes. Poor, ignorant fly, probably caught in the window or something along those lines, doesn't realize what's happening here, and so instead of letting things be silent and holy, he buzzes. The narrator is distracted by the sound; her focus shifts from her impeding demise to the sound of the fly. He interrupts her peaceful trip into the hereafter, and that tiny interpose is all that's needed for her to miss what she wanted to be a sacred and holy moment...she's distracted by the "blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz" and misses the moment of rapture she's been expecting when she dies, and then she's dead. Rather than her last thoughts on earth being of the holy and sacred, she was thinking of a fly.

The deeper meaning that I think we can glean from this is that no matter how much you plan, no matter how much you decide, no matter how much you plot, death is out of your control. You're not in charge of this one thing. You can try to kill yourself, but whether or not you succeed isn't in your hands. You can prepare for things and hope that all goes according to your design, but ultimately, that's not in your hands. Everything can seem entirely perfect, but at the last minute, a fly could make your ideal exit of this world go from magical to mundane.

Next?

-------
Let yourself be enchanted,
You just might break through
To ever ever after

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