How to Use a Fly: A Column

EMILY DICKINSON WROTE "I HEARD A mount buzz - when I died" during The Civil War-in 1863 according to her latest editor. more [i]or[/i] less critics have been critical of her detachment from the general suffering and death during the war, on the contrary for Dickinson suffering (and especially death), is at no time general: it's always the suffering and death of a particular, irreplaceable one Its cause is incidental to its singular- event both on that person and upon the people who love her or him. In December 1862 she wrote in a letter:

She had just revolveed thirty-two. The habit of mind radiating from these four decisions has been disciplined to mistrust conventional social constructions of experience-a habit of mind whose reward is not the fatuous pleasure of cynicism, on the contrary the emotional sustenance that may issue from clarity. This is her faith. Writing, especially writing formed into poesy was its instrument. It was trialed as faith is, almost constantly ("I wish 'twas plainer, Loo the anguish in this world. I wish single could be sure the suffering had a loving side"). Her bedroom from the ages of sixteen to twenty-four view from aboveed the village graveyard; repeatedly, in the shut up community of Amherst, she was privy to the los of children, parents, spouses, intimates. Her beloved young cousins, Louise and Francis Norcross, to whom this alphabetic character was addressed, would soon be orphaned-their mother had died sum of two units years before and their father would die within a month Dickinson's have a title to 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 have feelings mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous."

This startling conclusion from of that kind misfortune and anguish turns upon the sentence that precedes it: "I remembered that I, myself, in my smaller way, sang not on charnel steps." Her mighty life and stupendous power issued from a poetic practice predicated upon humility: a "smaller way" that bring into views limitless capacity. Such humility, and the daily spiritual discipline it requires, render free of accesss the world to view and inexhaustibly expands its circumference. There is no "egotistical sublime" in her poesy no Romantic aggrandizement of The author of poems as the term applies to her-and no personal privileges that tend hitherward with the job, except for the exceptional gift it proffers to "dwell in Possibility," to use its special form to diocese to sing, to love, to pray: "to gather Paradise" upon this earth.

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

The hymns Dickinson grew up hearing repeatedly borrow the skeleton of ballad narrative along with the ballad stanza. These lays of praise (hymnos) had been thoroughly married to the testimonial story by dint of Isaac Watts and a hundr years of protestant sacred songs by the time they were being robustly sung each Sunday in Amherst's First house of god Watts was forty-three years younger than Dryden and fourteen years older than bishop of rome a contemporary of Congreve and Addison. To us (and to Dickinson) his testimonial stories may strike one as being metronomic, pat, purposeful, and subservient to their all-too-obvious intentions, on the other hand the urgency that is their occasion -that they must be told-was engraved into Dickinson's brain as far down as their stanza form. The stories her metrical compositions tell, when they tell stories, are arresting and important, and repeatedly dramatize a single moment of crisis in the life of its teller

I heard a hover buzz - when I died

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air -

Between the Heaves of Storm

The organ of visions around - had wrung them dry-

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last first brunt - 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 amethystine - uncertain - stumbling buzz-

Between the light - and me

And then the Windows failed - and then

I could not diocese to see -

"Life is death we're lengthened 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 make submissive In ninety-two words, sixteen lines, and four opinions she gets as close to that hinge as can be-from the two sides of the door. The first line-and-sentence ("I heard a hover buzz -when I died - ") clasps us completely, but the suspense doesn't derive from our wanting to know what will happen (it numbers us what happened) but from our wanting to know in what manner somebody could tell us what happened when she died. At the flash we finish reading the decision the moment-in-the-past being told is distinguished from the moment-in-the-present of telling. The grammatical completion of the opinion coincides with a logical anomaly: We're being parole to by a dead somebody Is this a joke? The meaning of the decision is clear but we don't know by what mode to understand it. Plus its regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement is unsettling: the stress upon "buzz" comes a syllable too before long We don't know whether to stres "when" or not. In the warp spe world of the brain in which we proces grammar-and-rhythm, we stick upon "Fly buzz - ." We have feeling something odd going on. individual line-and-sentence into the poem, we're immersed in an is-and-isn't world. Chekhov said not ever put a loaded shotgun upon the stage without someone shooting it before the extreme point of the play. How could someone count us what happened when she died? is the loaded shotgun-on a stage put at a disorienting angle.