I heard a Fly buzz — when I died

Nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson explored mourning, religious doubt, and the nature of knowledge in her 1862 poem “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died.” While the rest of the Dickinson family publicly joined the Amherst First Congregational Church during a time of intense religious revival, Dickinson never did and even stopped attending by 1868. Death fueled Dickinson’s religious questions and insecurities. “The world goes out, and I see nothing but her room, and angels bearing her into those great countries in the blue sky of which we don’t know anything,” Dickinson wrote after her maternal aunt’s death in 1860 (Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson Letters. Edited by Emily Fragos, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). 

Much of this letter’s imagery echoes inside “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died,” a poem which also features a room and a presence that seems to whisk the dying speaker away into the unknown. Dickinson weaves religious meter, symbolism, and ideas throughout the poem as if trying to break through the fact she “could not see to see.” If she did, she might have a possibility of cutting through “the difficulty of establishing a relationship with God” (Ladin, Jay.