How to Use a Fly: A Column

EMILY DICKINSON WROTE "I HEARD A FLY buzz - when I died" during The Civil War-in 1863, according to her latest editor. Some critics have been critical of her detachment from the general suffering and death during the war, but for Dickinson suffering (and especially death), is never general: it's always the suffering and death of a particular, irreplaceable person. Its cause is incidental to its singular- effect, both on that person and on the people who love her or him. In December 1862, she wrote in a letter:

She had just turned thirty-two. The habit of mind radiating from these four sentences has been disciplined to mistrust conventional social constructions of experience-a habit of mind whose reward is not the fatuous pleasure of cynicism, but the emotional sustenance that may issue from clarity. This is her faith. Writing, especially writing formed into poetry, was its instrument. It was tested, as faith is, almost constantly ("I wish 'twas plainer, Loo, the anguish in this world. I wish one could be sure the suffering had a loving side"). Her bedroom from the ages of sixteen to twenty-four overlooked the village graveyard; repeatedly, in the close community of Amherst, she was privy to the loss of children, parents, spouses, intimates. Her beloved young cousins, Louise and Francis Norcross, to whom this letter was addressed, would soon be orphaned-their mother had died two years before and their father would die within a month. Dickinson's own mother was an invalid, and Dickinson herself may have already been suffering the initial symptoms of the anterior uveitis that made her think she was going blind. And her conclusion is: "Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous."

This startling conclusion from such misfortune and anguish turns on the sentence that precedes it: "I remembered that I, myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps." Her mighty life and stupendous power issued from a poetic practice predicated on humility: a "smaller way" that produces limitless capacity. Such humility, and the daily spiritual discipline it requires, opens the world to view and inexhaustibly expands its circumference. There is no "egotistical sublime" in her poetry, no Romantic aggrandizement of The Poet as the term applies to her-and no personal privileges that come with the job, except for the exceptional gift it offers to "dwell in Possibility," to use its special form to see, to sing, to love, to pray: "to gather Paradise" on this earth.

Therefore it is no accident that the form she chose for her poems was both a liturgical and musical one: liturgical, because her poetic practice is religious (OED: "a particular system of faith or worship"); musical, because music orchestrates feeling (which is why it's so useful to institutionalized religion). Dickinson grew up hearing hymns and playing them on the piano. The form of the hymn stanza was engraved into her brain. The hymn stanza grew out of the ballad stanza: four beats, three beats, four beats, three beats in alternating isochronous lines of varying numbers of syllables locked in a rhyming quatrain. Words thus arranged become both mysteriously compelling and easy to remember, and have a tenacious popular appeal that makes the stanza's transference from ballad to hymn seem historically inevitable as soon as the power of churches depended as much on the laity as on the hierarchy.

The hymns Dickinson grew up hearing often borrow the skeleton of ballad narrative along with the ballad stanza. These songs of praise (hymnos) had been thoroughly married to the testimonial story by Isaac Watts and a hundred years of protestant hymns by the time they were being robustly sung every Sunday in Amherst's First Church. Watts was forty-three years younger than Dryden and fourteen years older than Pope, a contemporary of Congreve and Addison. To us (and to Dickinson) his testimonial stories may seem metronomic, pat, purposeful, and subservient to their all-too-obvious intentions, but the urgency that is their occasion -that they must be told-was engraved into Dickinson's brain as deeply as their stanza form. The stories her poems tell, when they tell stories, are arresting and important, and often dramatize a single moment of crisis in the life of its teller.

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 -

"Life is death we're lengthy at, death the hinge to life," she wrote to the Norcross sisters in late May 1863, after their father was dead. Was she thinking of this poem-which she may have just written or was about to write? She was certainly thinking of its subject. In ninety-two words, sixteen lines, and four sentences, she gets as close to that hinge as can be-from both sides of the door. The first line-and-sentence ("I heard a fly buzz -when I died - ") hooks us completely, but the suspense doesn't derive from our wanting to know what will happen (it tells us what happened) but from our wanting to know how somebody could tell us what happened when she died. At the moment we finish reading the sentence, the moment-in-the-past being told is distinguished from the moment-in-the-present of telling. The grammatical completion of the sentence coincides with a logical anomaly: We're being spoken to by a dead person. Is this a joke? The meaning of the sentence is clear but we don't know how to understand it. Plus its rhythm is unsettling: the stress on "buzz" comes a syllable too soon. We don't know whether to stress "when" or not. In the warp speed world of the brain in which we process grammar-and-rhythm, we stick on "Fly buzz - ." We feel something odd going on. One line-and-sentence into the poem, we're immersed in an is-and-isn't world. Chekhov said never put a loaded shotgun on the stage without someone shooting it before the end of the play. How could someone tell us what happened when she died? is the loaded shotgun-on a stage set at a disorienting angle.

This shotgun does get shot, but not before it's excruciatingly toyed with by the story-teller.

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air

Between the Heaves of Storm

Is this how someone could tell us she heard a fly buzz when she died? Only if we thought the reason she could speak posthumously was that the room had been so quiet. The stillness in this room is a particular stillness, and, in being so precisely described, may divert us briefly. We're put into the room where the speaker died. We're in the story. But whenever the word "like" is used, it implies a mind making the comparison, reminding us that there is someone telling this story-someone, dead or alive, who has paid very close attention to Storni, of both the literal and metaphorical variety. The speaker characterizes herself through the character of her observation. A large part of our response to the poem is to the creation of a speaker we respond to. (Dickinson reminded Higginson, "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse - it does not mean - me - but a supposed person.") This "supposed person" is someone we want to listen to, someone detached enough from the moment of her own death to compare the stillness in the room to what she has previously observed in nature (the stillness in the air between the heaves of storm). She's already dead is why she's so detached, we might induce, except the figure she uses implies Storm is continuous. If this stillness in this room is indeed like the stillness in the air between the heaves of storm, then what follows is also Storm, both in this room (for the deathwatchers) and in the next "life" (for the speaker) on the other side of the hinge. Her detachment seems even stranger as the figure debunks the conventional notion of a peaceful afterlife. Wherever this speaker is speaking from, she's neither smug nor solaced, much less saved. If she were, the poem would be wrecked. It would be pietistic, a church-hymn instead of a peculiar testimony. We wouldn't like the speaker because she wouldn't be like us, still swirled by Storm.

Then the narrative shifts back in time, in the room, in the life we know and a Heave of Storm we're familiar with:

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset - when the King

Be witnessed - in the Room

The past perfect tense ("had wrung") effects the time shift. It instantly sets back the clock (a few seconds, a few minutes?), in order to move the story forward again to the inexorable moment. The speaker recedes into the background of the deathbed scene and into the minds of the deathwatchers preparing to see God at the Moment of Truth a Ia Calvinist doctrine. That they are "Eyes" and "Breaths," and that her death is called "that last Onset," doesn't let us forget the speaker's distinctive point-of-view and character. With a wry joke, she gestures toward the loaded-shotgun jutting out of the closet:

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable -

"What portion of me be assignable": Buried in this little efficient joke is the assertion that there's a portion of her that's not assignable, which is the portion (since she's dead) that is telling the story -which, for lack of a better term, is usually called the soul. That we're being told a story by a dead person is a joke, just as we suspected after reading the first line-and-sentence, but it's not the silly joke we thought it might be. It's a different kind of joke: the sort caused by the uncanny, provoking astonishment not cruelty, fueled as the best jokes are by terror at the inevitable and uncontrollable. It may make us happy to feel safe for now, if not safe for very long from now. It rings a chord with the irony of hearing a fly buzz at the moment of death and reminds us yet again that we're not just in the story but in the presence of someone alive-in-death (this "soul") that we're getting to know pretty well by line ii.

The joke, its effects, and its buried assertions merge very quickly (within a single line!) into the compelling story that had been summarized in the first line-and-sentence of the poem.

"I heard a fly buzz - when I died" becomes "I saw a Fly buzz - when I died." The moment initially summarized is translated into visual terms and extended grammatically with the first circumlocution in the poem (and then it was [that] there interposed a Fly with) and the first triple adjectives (Blue -uncertain - stumbling) in a poem that has almost no adjectives elsewhere much less triple ones. The sentence's grammar in lines 11-13 interposes between the reader and the forward motion of the narrative (since action is carried through subjectverb-object) just as the fly in the story interposed between the speaker and the light. This gives us the experience of "interposed." The spatial and temporal experience referred to by the words to is rendered through the sequence of the words fixed into form. We're locked into the perspective of the person dying, the character in the story. At the same time, the circumlocution calls our attention to the person "living," the teller of the story. "And then there interposed a Fly" would have focused only on what happened, whereas "and then it was [that] there interposed a Fly" hauls the shotgun onto center-stage before the grammar becomes direct and action compressed through the climactic final two words of the poem.

"And then the Windows failed - and then / I could not see to see -." Ka-boom goes the shotgun. The final miraculous move is to turn irony itself on its ear. This ugly annoying fly is the last thing the speaker sensed on earth, and, ironically, it's what appears while the deathwatchers were expecting the King God to appear. But then "I could not see to see - ": even this lowly creature provides a great ' occasion. The assertion buried here is that this great occasion is available to us only while we have physical eyes-only while we're alive for the sacramental act of seeing, only when we're not distracted by doctrine that calls for the appearance of a grandiose God instead of moment-by-moment attention to the humble things of the earth.

But Dickinson isn't preaching, she's practicing. Impossibly, she breaks down the indivisible moment of death into a sequence of smaller moments (And then . . . and then . . . and then): after there interposed a fly, the windows fail. The world acts almost independently of the character-in-the-story while we are inside her point-of-view. Death is something that happens to her, that happens to people. We feel how it feels. We are helpless, on a battlefield or in a bedroom. And this particular death then produces a particular incapacity in this particular person who, up until that last nanosecond, could see to see.

It's characteristic of Dickinson's technique that this runic final line is utterly grounded by its formal solidity, the "not see" echoing the double stress of "Fly buzz" (and "last Onfset]" and "me be") before the iambic final "to see." For Isaac Watts, absolute metricality was indicative of higher organization, lifting discourse out of the flawed contingency of human usage. For Dickinson, poems are utterly contingent, yet profoundly organized. Musical does not mean sonorous, any more than rhythm means meter: it means affecting our feelings by means of manifold pattern. According to Dickinson's friend, Kate Anthon, "on those celestial and blissful evenings . . . full of merriment, brilliant wit, and inexhaustible laughter, Austin and Sue's guests were sometimes treated to Emily at the piano playing weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration."

Dickinson also played such melodies in her poems. These sixteen lines rhyme Room-Storm-firm-Room, and be-Fly-me-see: eight-line asymmetrical pairs that contain respectively three sentences and one sentence of five independent clauses. The half-rhymes mark the endings of alternating tetrameter-trimeter lines but don't chop the lines into discrete units. The hymn is underneath the speech not abstracting it. The power of the testimony depends on its credibility as speech, hence the enjambed sentences and emphatic metrical irregularities and contrapuntal dashes. The rhythm not only expresses the experience, it is the experience. In the first eight-line pair, the rhyme words (Room-Storm-firm-Room) form an envelope of the room. In the second eight-line pair (be-Fly-me-see), the Fly is distinct and unleashed. With "see to see" we actually get five rhyme-words. We're brought up short on the first "see." The pattern is fulfilled early then drummed again on the second, most emphatic, see. We have to know what this see means to say it properly, but the rhythm forces us to say it properly thereby teaching us what it means.

The narrative having been both completed and extended, the I-in-the-story and the I-telling-the story join in the last two words of the poem. They become one person, forever unable to see. Poignant (as meaning), exhilarating (as technique), it all comes together with a click, as Yeats said, like a closing box. While experiencing the speaker's death with her, we're directed by her testimony to see to see while we're still alive. The poignancy is fused with moral force. The final line lifts us out of the poem with something we could use to enrich our lives while riveting us down with what it means to die: to lose the capacity to see physically and spiritually.

This line may be even more poignant if we think of Dickinson in 1863 worrying about going blind (and rapidly making fair drafts of all her poems and gathering them into fascicles). Vision is ubiquitous in her work, as it was in her life, with vistas from both her bedroom where she wrote and the cupola on top of the house. How could this person have lived without seeing, without reading and writing? But her worry may have caused this great line to come to her. Her suffering may have contained this gift. She is a master of paradox, of the blessing in disguise and delusion in triumph, of articulating what Richard Wilbur called "sumptuous destitution." And of course the larger assertion buried in the rhetoric of this poem is that one can tell the story of one's death after one dies-at least this "supposed person" can for the time of this particular poem. Afterlife is not proved but enacted, although the "Heaven above" may pale compared to the "Heaven below." This is the wryest joke of the poem, and, if fully understood, the saddest and the sweetest and (paradoxically) the most hopeful.

"It is not that it was so," Aristotle says in The Poetics about the credibility of a story, "but that it might be so": just one of the artistic thrills Dickinson must have felt writing "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - " was in testing how far Aristotle's principle can be extended, and extended in a poem (this poem). Solace is too pale a word for what the poet gets from the contingent renderings-inlanguage her poems yield to her (and to us). It is something more active than solace: vital, childlike, permeated by pleasure and prowess, a beatific joy comprised of horrific pain that does not make the pain less horrific but gives it a name that is one particular poem then another then another that does not only what no other form of discourse does but also what no other poem does, has, or ever will.

MICHAEL RYAN has two books forthcoming this Spring: Baby B, a memoir, from Graywolf and New and Selected Poems from Houghton Mifflin. he has published three previous volumes of poems, an autobiography (Secret Life), and a collection of essays about poets, poetry, and writing (A Difficult Grace). he is professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine.

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