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Poem 465 Essays: Disillusions At The Moment Of Death

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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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