Dickinson, Emily. "I heard a Fly buzz when I died".

Summary and Analysis

The choice of tenses in the poem renders the speaker as a dead person who recalls her last moments of earthly life. The Fly buzz seems to symbolize death. There is an image of the still room in which she lay dying and whose stillness resembled the stillness in the air before a storm.

Another powerful image is that of the "eyes" which were surrounding her death bed. She starts to mention her last will, but then the buzz of the fly approaches, the storm and possibly a stroke of lightning is here and cuts her off from the light. Then she could not see anymore.