The poem, "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died," by Emily Dickinson describes what one woman experiences right before death. The poem is written in ballad stanza, a form that's meant to be said aloud or sang like a song. "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" has two characteristics that differentiate itself from other ballad stanzas, making it unique. Firstly, the poem doesn't rhyme - other than stanza four - which greatly diminishes the supposedly song-like construct. Secondly, there are dashes all throughout the poem disrupting the flow of sentences. These two aspects of the poem make it more of a narrative story than a song, and switch the mood of the poem from lively and joyous to solemn and ominous. Since the speaker of the poem is beyond the grave, "when I died" "(line 1), the effects of the dashes in the poem add to the visualization of a recently deceased narrator, with a connection to the former world not completely severed. .
In the first stanza, a completely opposite image is formed between the fly and the room, "I heard a Fly Buzz "when I died/The stillness in the room "(line 1-2). With the fly buzzing around, the room is soaked in complete stillness and quietness as the repeated uses of stillness and the imagery Heaves of Storm suggested. The third foot of first line "Buzz "when " is the only trochee out of the perfect iambic stanza one, reinforcing the image that the buzzing is the only sound in the room. Along with the irregularity of the rhythm, the consonance of s sound of Stillness, Heaves, and Storm bring up the contrast between the fly and the room and what each of them might symbolize. .
The narrator then starts to describe the room right before he died, where people around him would weep and wait for the moment of his death. The nice little assonance of "around " and "wrung " brings our attention to the end of line 5 "them dry". This line slows down the pace of the poem to the image that the people in the room are waiting patiently for the "last onset "(line 7), the last event of the dying man's life.
