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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - (591)

Consider that buzz; the buzz, when that wayward mosquito flies close, then irrepressibly explodes in one’s ear, removing one from any immersed activity to shoo it away or reduce it to flatness. The poem begins similarly by suggesting the fly in a typical human-insect relation, one of general irritation on behalf of the human that suffuses into the background noise of the poem, suggesting the absolute and overflowing “Stillness” in the room as transformable into an atmospheric underside-buzz. The speaker, however, unlike that insect-circled reader, lies dormant in deathbed and can only record in a strange retrospective tone, the anticipated-ness for the coming of a force of nature. The voice in this paradoxical position creates an effect that suggests an escape of the text itself.

The tension within the poem is Sisyphean. The scene is that of the final moments of the speaker upon deathbed, the end of an end which immediately begins the narrative in its climax. Yet there is a strange fizzling out of this tension at the entrance of the second stanza. The “Eyes”, having already wrung themselves dry of any tears or emotion, foregrounds a retrospective space that these synecdochic spectators existed and acted in, greatly removing immediacy and pressure. At the next moment the poem regenerates tension again through the breath-holding in anticipation of the oxymoron “last Onset”, with such intensity that an extra syllable juts out from the otherwise perfect hymnal metre, amplifying and estranging this final event of the speaker’s death. But once again, in another fall, this building tension in line 8 dissolves in the next line through the mention of paperwork. This time however, at the nadir of this tension removal, the fly interposes itself in line 12. It recovers that deathly tension through the buzz methodically until it culminates in the speaker’s death in the last stanza. The buzz, in a synesthetic blockade, accompanies the speaker’s loss of sight in a mechanical procession; the buzz comes between the light, my eyelids (“Windows”) fail, I could not see. The random fly, somehow through usurping the King, or Death or God, as the ferryman for the speaker, manages to become the logical driving and ending force for the narrative within the poem.

And yet, has the speaker truly died? That Dickinsonian dash at the end that suggests continuity, and the posthumous voice seems to tell otherwise. This problematic position is foreshadowed in the beginning in that encompassing “Stillness” that is “Between the Heaves of Storm”; Dickinson suggests that there exists an other side, the other “Storm”. Then at the end of line 16, “see to see”, implies of a speaker soul seeing the living world through the eyes of the speaker body. The poem ends because this living eye closes. The immersive tension of reading a poem ends as well without truly reaching an in-text death.

This continual loss and recovery can be read as the Dickinsonian agnosticism and playfulness with which she secularizes the hymnal form, but in the same sense that “the body as self or as object in relation to God cannot serve as a sign of God's presence because the individual's experience of being embodied has become its own reality—a sign of itself,” (Yudman 88) the Fly, or nature, can just as well substitute God, presence as agency, and language or text as the body within the poem. The speaker, instead of standing in between that liminal of life and death, body and soul, stands between the self and the other. By displacing God with the Fly, the poem gains function as a companion to ecological thought. The Derridean notion that “there is no outside-text” which underlies ecomimetic writing denies Nature as a speaker, and refrains from transcending the text precisely because there is no need to, as the very act of writing about nature inevitably intra-acts with nature and requires nature itself. The poem, by virtue of its own paradoxical existence, becomes its own evidence for the hopeful joining of the self and the other through language itself, in a similar way to the existential position of humans and chase for meaning. The poem becomes the liminal “last Onset”, and becomes the impossible experience that rhythmically grinds the “I”, “Eyes” and “Fly” into unity. When the speaker returns from that membrane of the living (or steps through fully into the Fly’s agency), the poem ends. The poem form cannot truly capture the Fly’s reality when the entangled spondaic “Fly Buzz” is the human equivalent of language for the Fly, but there is no need to attempt to buzz when, through writing, we can “see to see”. The tension of reading this poem dissolves when this posthumous voice loses any sight on the living. The poem ends. But we, read and live.

References
Yukman, Claudia. "Breaking the Eschatological Frame: Dickinson's Narrative Acts." The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 1 no. 1, 1992, pp. 76-94. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/edj.0.0162

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Previously, I have read the relationship between the poetic persona and the fly in Poem 591 as an interaction – two beings relating to each other on their own terms. A fly and a human. However, by considering these two beings as entangled with each other in a moment of death, I now see the possibility of the anthropomorphic fly. What of the fly that hears a human breathe their last breaths? In Poem 591, we may empathise with two beings experiencing a morbid yet natural part of life – death. There is a common myth that in death, animals wish to be alone. The fly does not allow this for the poetic persona. In death, the poetic persona reveals to us an intra-connection, and the fly provides solidarity for its fading human companion. – Siobhan Seeneevassen
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1. I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - (591) Consider that buzz; the buzz, when that wayward mosquito flies close, then irrepressibly explodes in one’s ear, removing one from any immersed activity to shoo it away or reduce it to flatness. The poem begins similarly by suggesting the fly in a typical human-insect relation, one of general irritation on behalf of the human that suffuses into the background noise of the poem, suggesting the absolute and overflowing “Stillness” in the room as transformable into an atmospheric underside-buzz. The speaker, however, unlike that insect-circled reader, lies dormant in deathbed and can only record in a strange retrospective tone, the anticipated-ness for the coming of a force of nature. The voice in this paradoxical position creates an effect that suggests an escape of the text itself.
  
  The tension within the poem is Sisyphean. The scene is that of the final moments of the speaker upon deathbed, the end of an end which immediately begins the narrative in its climax. Yet there is a strange fizzling out of this tension at the entrance of the second stanza. The “Eyes”, having already wrung themselves dry of any tears or emotion, foregrounds a retrospective space that these synecdochic spectators existed and acted in, greatly removing immediacy and pressure. At the next moment the poem regenerates tension again through the breath-holding in anticipation of the oxymoron “last Onset”, with such intensity that an extra syllable juts out from the otherwise perfect hymnal metre, amplifying and estranging this final event of the speaker’s death. But once again, in another fall, this building tension in line 8 dissolves in the next line through the mention of paperwork. This time however, at the nadir of this tension removal, the fly interposes itself in line 12. It recovers that deathly tension through the buzz methodically until it culminates in the speaker’s death in the last stanza. The buzz, in a synesthetic blockade, accompanies the speaker’s loss of sight in a mechanical procession; the buzz comes between the light, my eyelids (“Windows”) fail, I could not see. The random fly, somehow through usurping the King, or Death or God, as the ferryman for the speaker, manages to become the logical driving and ending force for the narrative within the poem.
  
  And yet, has the speaker truly died? That Dickinsonian dash at the end that suggests continuity, and the posthumous voice seems to tell otherwise. This problematic position is foreshadowed in the beginning in that encompassing “Stillness” that is “Between the Heaves of Storm”; Dickinson suggests that there exists an other side, the other “Storm”. Then at the end of line 16, “see to see”, implies of a speaker soul seeing the living world through the eyes of the speaker body. The poem ends because this living eye closes. The immersive tension of reading a poem ends as well without truly reaching an in-text death.
  
  This continual loss and recovery can be read as the Dickinsonian agnosticism and playfulness with which she secularizes the hymnal form, but in the same sense that “the body as self or as object in relation to God cannot serve as a sign of God's presence because the individual's experience of being embodied has become its own reality—a sign of itself,” (Yudman 88) the Fly, or nature, can just as well substitute God, presence as agency, and language or text as the body within the poem. The speaker, instead of standing in between that liminal of life and death, body and soul, stands between the self and the other. By displacing God with the Fly, the poem gains function as a companion to ecological thought. The Derridean notion that “there is no outside-text” which underlies ecomimetic writing denies Nature as a speaker, and refrains from transcending the text precisely because there is no need to, as the very act of writing about nature inevitably intra-acts with nature and requires nature itself. The poem, by virtue of its own paradoxical existence, becomes its own evidence for the hopeful joining of the self and the other through language itself, in a similar way to the existential position of humans and chase for meaning. The poem becomes the liminal “last Onset”, and becomes the impossible experience that rhythmically grinds the “I”, “Eyes” and “Fly” into unity. When the speaker returns from that membrane of the living (or steps through fully into the Fly’s agency), the poem ends. The poem form cannot truly capture the Fly’s reality when the entangled spondaic “Fly Buzz” is the human equivalent of language for the Fly, but there is no need to attempt to buzz when, through writing, we can “see to see”. The tension of reading this poem dissolves when this posthumous voice loses any sight on the living. The poem ends. But we, read and live.
  
  References
  Yukman, Claudia. "Breaking the Eschatological Frame: Dickinson's Narrative Acts." The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 1 no. 1, 1992, pp. 76-94. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/edj.0.0162