Poem 5 Fly buzz

die
I heard a Fly buzz when I died
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air
Between the Heaves of Storm

The Eyes around had wrung them dry

And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset when the King
Be witnessed in the Room

I willed my Keepsakes Signed away

What portion of me be
Assignable and then it was
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

Analysis 1
In summary, I heard a Fly buzz when I died is a poem spoken by a dead person:
note the past tense of died in that first line. The speaker is already dead, and is
telling us about what happened at her deathbed. (We say her but the speaker
could well be male Dickinson often adopts a male voice in her poems, so the
point remains moot.) And dying, one of the most momentous events in anyones
life (and certainly the last), is foregrounded in that opening line though not as
much as it could be. No, first we have to heard about the fly that buzzed. The
opening line, I heard a Fly buzz when I died, is the opposite of bathos (that
anti-climax where one starts grandly and then fizzles out, such as in Alexander
Popes celebrated line from The Rape of the Lock: Dost sometimes counsel take,
and sometimes tea): here, we start with the small the literally small and end
with the momentous, died.

Everything, we are told, was still and silent around the speakers deathbed. Even
the mourners attending her have stopped weeping: The Eyes around had wrung
them dry, meaning their eyes had wrung themselves dry or they had wrung
their eyes dry with crying. Nows not the time for tears: only stillness and silence.
Everyone, Dickinsons speaker tells us, seemed braced for the moment when the
speaker of the poem would die, and the King would be Emily
Dickinsonwitnessed in the room presumably King Death, coming to take the
speaker away. The speaker had just signed her will doling out her Keepsakes to
her beneficiaries, and it was then, we are told, after her last will and testament
had been signed, that the fly interposed itself in the scene. With Blue
uncertain stumbling Buzz uses Dickinsons trademark dashes to great effect,
conveying the sudden, darting way flies can move around a room, especially
around light. We may not have thought of such a movement as stumbling (can
flying insects stumble?) and so the presence of the word pulls us up short, makes
us stumble over Dickinsons line.
This fly comes between the speaker and the light. Has she seen the light? How
should we interpret this? Is it simply the candle or lamp in the room lighting it
(such as would attract a bluebottle to it), or is the light signalling the arrival of
that King, Death? Has he come for her? And why then do the Windows fail, and
how should we analyse that final line, I could not see to see? Perhaps one clue is
offered by the way we talk, in the English language, of seers and second sight:
seers were often blind in that they couldnt physically see, but in another sense
they saw further than everyone else because they had the gift of foresight and
prophecy (consider Tiresias from Oedipus Rex). Second sight, similarly, is a
supposed form of clairvoyance whereby the gifted person has access to an
invisible world the world beyond death, for instance. So the speaker could be
saying (at the moment of death itself?) that she could no longer physically see in
order to find her way forward into the next world. Consider the more everyday
phrase, I cant do right for doing wrong: Dickinsons last line might be analysed
as a cryptic variation on that expression.

Flies, of course, are associated with death and the dead: they feed on the dead.
Yet the presence of this fly remains puzzling. How should we analyse I heard a Fly
buzz in terms of its central image or object: the fly itself? Is this association
between death and flies feeding on corpses and carrion all there is to it, or is it the
deliberate juxtaposition of the very small (a common insect) and the very big
(death itself) that Dickinson wants us to think about? The question remains open.

Dickinsons rhymes can often seem haphazard: half-rhymes, off-rhymes, words

that have only the vaguest sounds in common between them. Yet there is a
delicate interplay of rhymes in I heard a Fly buzz. Room and Storm in that first
stanza are echoed in the following stanza, which has firm and Room; died
becomes tautened, or dried out, into dry; in the third stanza, the be that
rhymes with Fly calls up the Buzz that is suggested by be(e), as well as the
rhyming me and see in that final stanza. (Buzz is also foreshadowed by was
in the preceding stanza, with this small verb being retrospectively encouraged to
join in the onomatopoeia of Buzz.)

In the last analysis, I heard a Fly buzz when I died is one of Emily Dickinsons
most popular poems probably because of its elusiveness, and because like many
of her great poems, and her meditations on death it raises more questions than
it settles. How do you interpret the fly in this poem?
https://interestingliterature.com/2016/09/13/a-short-analysis-of-emily-dickinsons-i-
heard-a-fly-buzz-when-i-died/

Analysis 2
The poem presents a three-part comparisonthe width of the brain to the width
of the sky, the depth of the brain to the depth of the sea, and the weight of the
brain to the weight of God. The brain is wider than the sky, because it contains it.
As the manuscript shows, Dickinson toyed with the word include for contain,
putting them both side by side and marked with plus signs, leaving us with textual
variants. The 1896 edition of the poem uses include (but doesnt preserve her
dashes and capitalization). The inclusion isnt physical, of course, but mental. The
brain includes the sky as a mental image or an object of thought. The
container/inclusion metaphor governs the second comparison, too. The bucket
contains the sponge, but the sponge absorbs and contains the water; and nature
includes the brain, but the brain includes the sea by absorbing its image.
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Although Dickinson uses brain to stand for mind, she doesnt equate them in a
reductionist way; rather, she uses something tangiblethe brain as a physical
organto indicate something intangiblethe power of thought to envision the
enormity of nature.
Metonymy is the name for this figure of speech. Its basic strategy, according to
literary theorist, Kenneth Burke (1897-1993), is to convey some incorporeal or
intangible state in terms of the corporeal and tangible. We speak of the heart
instead of feelings, or the brain instead of thought or imagination.
Dickinsons figure of speech is also a synecdoche, because she treats the brain as
a part that stands for the whole of the mind, and as a microcosm that includes the
macrocosm.

Dickinsons poem presents an experience of the sublimeof the awesome

boundlessness of nature. The Dickinson sublime is unique. Whereas some
philosophers, notably Immanuel Kant, thought that, in experiencing the sublime,
we distance ourselves from nature and proclaim our superiority over it by being
able to comprehend it, Dickinson undermines this distance by having the braina
material thing of naturebe that which does the comprehending. This makes the
brain, too, sublime, because its power to contain by comprehension is so vast that
it includes the sky and sea. Dickinsons vision of the sublime isnt the Kantian one
of the mind transcending nature; rather, its a vision of the mind in nature or the
mind as nature. Nature, by way of the brain, beholds itself. The Dickinson sublime
is the inclusive sublime (a term I owe to Hilary Thompson).

But this power of the brain is also terrifyinganother quality of the sublime
because, as the poem tells us, the brain also easily contains you. If brain
stands for mind, then the mind is not only wider than the sky; its also wider
than you. You might think that you contain your mind, but its actually the other
way round: your mind contains youyour sense of selfand your mind is too vast
for you to comprehend. Think of a dream. From the depths of your mind (or brain)
a dream is generated, and neither you awake nor you within the dream knows
how and why this happens. Instead of there being a separate self that contains
and controls the mind, the self is something that the mind (or brain) envisions.
(This idea is a central theme of my book, Waking, Dreaming, Being.)
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Again, the poem isnt saying you are nothing but a pack of neurons (to quote
another late, Nobel Laureate biologistFrancis Crick). For one thing, Dickinsons
dashes express a suspension of such certainties. For another, she isnt reducing
the mind to the brain, but juxtaposing them, as in poem 937:

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind

As if my Brain had split

I tried to match it Seam by Seam

But could not make it fit.

-----

The thought behind, I strove to join

Unto the thought before

But Sequence ravelled out of Sound

Like Balls upon a Floor.

Here the part of the mind that escapes the comprehension of the self is the
sequence of thoughts, which decades later William James would call the stream
of thought, and today psychologists and neuroscientists call spontaneous
thought. Unlike task-directed thought (for example, solving a crossword puzzle),
which is the kind of thought that cognitive science has mostly studied,
spontaneous thought happens without conscious controlfor example, when you
daydream or your mind wanders. Usually such thought contains some mental
image of yourecalled from your past or projected into your futurebut you
dont control the thought and its deeper sources in the mind and brain seem
inscrutable. In this poem, Dickinson doesnt just anticipate William James and
cognitive science; she also anticipates Sigmund Freud.
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We see another kind of juxtaposition in the third stanza of poem 632, but one that
changes the terms and metaphor of the comparison. The brain is compared with
God, and weighing is the metaphor, not containing. The brain is only or exactly
(just) the weight of God. Dickinson was raised in a Calvinist household and
knew the Bible well, so she probably would have known that one of the Old
Testament Hebrew words translated as glory also means weight, and she
would have been familiar with Pauls Second Epistle to the Corinthians, in the
New Testament, in which he writes of an eternal weight of glory (2 Corinthians
4:17). For Christians, the word glory describes the manifestation or presence of
God, and human beings are believed to share in this glory by having been made
in the image of God. So, by writing, The Brain is just the weight of God,
Dickinson might have meant that the brain is the glory of God, a manifestation of
His presence in nature, or that the brain or mind is fashioned in Gods image. Yet,
given the line of thought in the previous stanzas, she equally might have meant
that God is an image made by the human brain or mind. (Dickinson struggled with
faith and doubt, and by age thirty-eight had stopped attending church. Her poem
202 declares: Faith is a fine invention/For Gentlemen who see!/But microscopes
are prudent/In an Emergency! And poem 1577 states: The Bible is an antique
Volume/Written by faded Men/At the suggestion of Holy Spectres.)

If the brain and God differ in their weightin their heaviness, importance, or glory
it will be, the poem tells us, as Syllable from Sound. Nature contains sounds,
but language contains them in the form of syllables. Vowels and consonants are
the sounds of language; syllables are their organization into sequential units,
which in turn make up words. On the one hand, syllables require sound, so the
poem could be suggesting that the brain or mind requires or depends on God.
Perhaps (as Johnny Lorenz suggests in an article on this poem) the brain is an
organized unit of God, as a syllable is an organized unit of sound. On the other
hand, sound not structured into syllables lacks meaning, so the poem could also
be suggesting that God is meaningless without the brain (contrary to the first
verse of the Gospel of John, which announces, In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.).

These ambiguitiesthe brain as part of Gods glory versus God as an image

devised by the brain; the brain as dependent on God versus God as dependent on
the brainare essential to the poems climactic stanza. So, too, is the ambiguity
of using brain as a metonymy or synecdoche for mind in the poem altogether.
These ambiguities are still very much with us today. Although neuroscience can
tell us much about ourselves, it cant teach us how to think about these kinds of
ambiguities; for that we need poetry and philosophy.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/waking-dreaming-being/201504/the-brain-
is-wider-the-sky

Analysis 3
Each stanza of this popular poem provides an interesting metaphor to ponder,
each one manifesting the wonders of a three-pound human brain encased in its
dark skull. The first two stanzas deftly channel into the final where Dickinson
engages cryptically in the ongoing theological question of whether God is created
in the brain or the brain is created by God. (By "brain" I am reading "mind"
throughout the poem. Dickinson's using "brain" adds interesting contrast: the
compact physical thing versus the diffuse and abstract.)
The first stanza goes up and wide, spanning the heavens: the "You", no
doubt a generalized reference to the reader, can stare at the sky day and night,
experience weather and seasonal changes, and take it all in "with ease" and
space to spare. In Dickinson's container metaphor the brain can hold not only the
sky but "You" as if it had unlimited storage capacity.
Next, Dickinson likens the brain to a sponge. It can absorb an entire sea just
as a sponge might sop up a bucket of water. The brain here is the limitless blue of
sea and sky.

Balance scales; photo by L.Miguel Bugallo Snchez

So far the brain is wide and deep; it can contain and absorb. The third and
final stanza makes the startling claim that its weight is "just the weight of God".
We don't think of either consciousness or God as having weight and neither did
Dickinson. But perhaps that is her point. Can a brain greater than sky or sea affect
on its own the unfurling of a rosebud or the safe return of a soldier to his family?
Can God? Is it possible that there is some fundamental unity between
consciousness/brain/mind and God, or that more particularly the first engenders
the other? I can't imagine Dickinson writing that last stanza without those
questions in mind.
But if there is any difference and Dickinson notably includes an element of
doubt it is what distinguishes "Syllable from Sound". While syllables are always
sound (or written representations of sound), sound is only occasionally syllables.
Perhaps Dickinson is implying that humans give voice to creation and creation's
Source.
http://bloggingdickinson.blogspot.ca/2015/04/the-brain-is-wider-than-sky.html

Analysis 4
This poem makes a number of interesting comparisons, which are quite
intelligible, if unusual. The image of the brain compared to the sky, and how
easily the brain can contain something such as the sky (or at least the concept of
it) and all within the world. It's a great mental comparison as well, as the image
forces one to imagine the finite space of a brain versus the seemingly infinite
space of the sky. In doing that, you've essentially proven the truth of that first
comparison. You can fathom the seemingly unfathomable on a level that is
understandable, even if without experience.

Taking the concept of something understandable yet unfathomable, Dickinson

applies that same thought to God. Her assertion is that your the sky is to your
brain as your brain is to God. That is to say, you can contain the infinite sky in
your head, just as easily as God contains all of infinity in Him. The simile, "As
Syllable from Sound" is a great example. Looking at a syllable, one knows how it
is pronounced. But the sound itself cannot be contained wholly within the
syllable. They are so closely related, but the difference is in tangibility. We can
contain and bind a syllable, but not a Sound. So too, Dickinson asserts, is God.
It's a lovely and thought provoking image, and applies to human life in general,
whether one believes in God or not.

Does the comparison speak to you in any way, or is Dickinson just repeating what
people have always intuitively understood? Let me know.

As an added bonus, if you sing nearly any Emily Dickinson poem to the tune of the
"Gilligan's Island" theme song, it works perfectly.
http://poetry-fromthehart.blogspot.ca/2011/06/brain-is-wider-than-sky-emily-
dickinson.html

Analysis 5
This is an interesting poem because it compares a physically small object (the
brain) to vast, huge spaces such as the sky and ocean as well as a theoretically
large figure (God). The beginning of the poem sets up the first comparison
between the brain and the sky. Dickinson claims that the brain is wider than the
sky, yet follows up with For-put them side by side- The one the other will
contain. Obviously the sky contains the brain, because the sky is the larger
space in which the brain exists. However, figuratively speaking the brain is wider
than the sky because it has the ability to learn and access all the information
under the sun. Although our brains do not expand very much physically speaking
throughout our lifetimes, they are constantly growing in the sense that we learn
more and more each day. Then Dickinson goes on to say that the brain is deeper
than the sea. Clearly the sea reaches thousands of feet deep at some parts, yet
Dickinson believes that the brains capacity for learning overcomes this physical
inequality. When she says For-hold them-Blue to Blue- The one the other will
abosorb- As Sponges-Buckets-do-, she compares the brain to the sponge and the
ocean to the bucket. Anyone would argue that a sponge is smaller than a bucket,
but the bucket does not have the same ability as the sponge. A brain inside the
ocean would allow the human to explore the environment and learn about the
surroundings. This intake of information is quite similar to the way a sponge reacts
when immersed in a bucket of water and squeezed. Walker Percy would approve
of such an excursion, which is very similar to his story of the dogfish and other
authentic experiences. (Ways of Reading 9th Edition.) The last stanza proved to be
the most difficult to analyze. However, after much speculation, the meaning is
clear. Dickinson states that the brain will differ from the weight of God only in the
way that syllable differs from sound. In order to understand this, one must look
into the difference between the two comparisons. A syllable is very much like a
unit of speech, or a single sound used to form a word. Whereas sound, on the
other hand, is more of an uncontrolled source of noise. Therefore a syllable is
more characteristic of a human while sound is more abstract, universal, and
possibly even divine. This puts the comparison in a much less complex
perspective in relation to the rest of the poem. Dickinson is trying to say that just
like with the sky and the ocean, the brain can gain information from God and
utilize it in the same way that humans use sound to form syllables.
https://ritzala.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/an-analysis-of-a-work-of-emily-dickinson/

Analysis 6
In Emily Dickinsons vocabulary the word brain, mind, self, and soul are often used
interchangeably. Dickinson draws distinctions between mind and heart, almost
asserting that the mind without the heart is mindless weak and dead, The Mind
lives on the Heart / Life any Parasite-(1-2). Elsewhere, she affirms, The Heart is
the Capital of the Mind (1354). However, brain can be seen as an essence of
glory for being alive. Dickinsons poetry continually claims a reality for the interior
world that is equal to or greater than that of the material world. In poem after
poem, she asserts that lifes greatest richesreality, free will, happiness, self-
respect, and creativity, can only be found within.

The Brain-is wider than the Sky (623), from 1863, is both a celebration of
human consciousness and the ability for the brain to contain the world outside
within its structure of reference:

The Brainis wider than the Sky

Forput them side by side
The one the other will contain
With easeand Youbeside
The Brain is deeper than the sea
Forhold themBlue to Blue
The one the other will absorb
As SpongesBucketsdo
The Brain is just the weight of God
ForHeft themPound for Pound
And they will differif they do
As Syllable from Sound
The first two stanzas lightheartedly develop two ways to compare and measure
first brain and sky, then brain and sea. In both instances the brain is larger, and
more voluminous and absorbing. In the final stanza, the poet turns her attention
from the visible, natural world, to the transcendent reality of God. Here theres
another method of measurement, Heft themPound for Pound (10),she finds
that the brain is not greater, but equal to just the weight of God (9). However,
if the brain and God were to differ, their only differ would be, As Syllable from
Sound (12).

If God is Sound, the all-encompassing, undifferentiated element of which the

shaping syllable of a human mind is made, then the brain is greater to God in its
density, though unable to exist without God, the source. Nonetheless, what if God
is the Syllable and the Brain is Sound? In John 1:1 it says, In the beginning was
the Word. In this reading, the brain, as the sound that evolved from that first
syllable, would be an echo of the divine. Thus, there is this syntactic ambiguity
here.

Biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff shares that, Syllables are concocted from sound
and contain them; the brain has been created by God, but nonetheless contains
Him (462). Charles Anderson reads the poem as contemplating that nature as a
well as God may prevail only in the mind. For him, The effect of the poem is not
to minimize the importance of God, or nature, but to magnify the value of the
consciousness (300). Even between the two critics is this unknowing and this
ever seeing syntactic ambiguity towards the poem and its true meaning.

Melanie Murphy

Bibliography and Further Readings Charles Roberts Anderson. Emily Dickinsons

Poetry; Stairway of Surprise (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.Print);
Emily Dickinson. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston, Mass: Little,
Brown, 1960. Print); Sharon Leiter. Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A
Literary Reference to Her Life and Work (New York, NY: Facts on File, 2007. Print);
Cynthia Griffin Wolff. Emily Dickinson (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley,
1988.Print).
https://linguistsandcontenders.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/the-brain-is-wider-than-
the-sky/

Analysis 7
Many of Emily Dickinsons poems present operations of the human mind as
physiological processes. These poems invite us to re-cognize Dickinson, that is,
first, to reflect on what it can mean to approach her poetry by way of the
cognitive sciences and secondly, to situate her poetics at the threshold of
fundamental transformations of our media ecology and thus of common ways of
perceiving, remembering, and creating the world. Interrogating how interactions
between brain, mind, world, and media figure in Dickinsons poems, this essay
explores cognition as both individually embodied and embedded in a history of

metaphor and mediation. Analysis 8

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Analysis 9
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Analysis 10
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Analysis 11
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Analysis 12
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Analysis 13
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Analysis 14
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