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Poem 465 Essays: Disillusions At The Moment Of Death

773 Words4 Pages

Disillusioned at the moment of death, the speaker in Emily Dickinson’s poem #465, plummets from her majestic spiritual expectations into the lowly position of simply being a carcass. Distracted by the anticipation of an impending ethereal experience, the speaker fails to recognize the significance of the fly at the moment of her death. Dickinson’s preliminary placement of the fly, “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died” in the beginning sentence offers a form of foreshadowing as well as emphasizes it’s roll (1). The speaker is encompassed by the ideas of her spiritual expectations and is waiting, “between the Heaves of Storm” for a heavenly excursion (4). However, the sound of the fly, an animal devoted to consuming the dead, brings reality to the audience that the speaker is simply a carcass waiting to be devoured. While she continues to focus on what she believes will be her divine resting place, Dickinson’s syntax helps the readers realize the finality of the speaker’s situation with the sound of the …show more content…

Dickinson’s syntactical choices and literary devices combine to create this dramatic irony. Dickinson’s reinsertion of the fly suggests to the readers that the speaker’s death is simply the end of her existence, while the speaker is still holding onto what she expects to be a divine intervention. The speaker has “willed [her] Keepsakes - Signed away/ What portions of [her] be/ Assignable,” and now she waits for “the King” to take the bulk of her being, what she believes is her soul (9-11). In reality she fails to realize that there is nothing left of her spirituality to give, she remains solely as flesh. Dickinson creates an ironic situation when she has the speaker acknowledge the presence of the fly without realizing it’s purpose in her situation. The fly is presented in the place of God to accept the speaker’s final possession, her body, not her

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Aside from the fly, a slew of mourners are also present at the narrator’s deathbed, as the narrator states that the “The Eyes around [them] - had wrung [themselves] dry” (Dickinson), proving how the mourners, or eyes, around the narrator, are devastated by the narrator’s death, as their eyes are dry from crying. In fact, the narrator’s death is so important that even “the King / [was] witnessed - in the Room” (Dickinson), with “the King” referring to God. This importance humanity, which is represented by the mourners, places on death is similar to that it places on marriage, as in The Storm, Calixta is aware of how her marriage makes her affair all the more scandalous, just as the mourners are aware of the narrator’s death is something monumental and holy. However, just as Calixta disregards her marriage due to her natural lust, the “stumbling fly,” interrupts the solemn mourners around the narrator’s deathbed with its clumsy and bumbling nature. Since the fly represents nature, this suggests that the narrator’s death is not as significant in the eyes of nature as it is in the eyes of humanity, just like nature doesn’t find Calixta’s marriage very important as it is the reason she possesses the instinct which drives

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932 Words | 4 Pages

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1319 Words | 6 Pages

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975 Words | 4 Pages

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1000 Words | 4 Pages

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558 Words | 3 Pages

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