Comparison Of The Buzz And I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died

“I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died” v.s “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”
Darkness. How is it perceived? The perception of darkness may have a broad variance depending on each individual. Darkness may symbolize fear, or to some even the glimmering night sky. For Emily Dickinson she writes about darkness as a form of death and tragedy. A lot of Emily Dickinson’s poems and stories were written in the era of the civil war, in that place and time there was much death, depression, and trials. It’s a possibility that some of Emily Dickinson’s writing could have been influenced and inspired by the war going on around her, especially her poems “I Heard a Fly Buzz-When I Died” and “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”. This is why I am intrigued to look further …show more content…
In the poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz –When I Died” she describes the funeral in the perspective as if she is the one who is dead, as if she’s lying in her coffin, at her own funeral. Since she is writing from the perspective of being dead the writing in this poem shows her to be much less emotional than her other poem. Michael Ryan also supports this opinion in his article ‘How to Use a Fly” he states: “The grammatical completion of the sentence coincides with a logical anomaly: We 're being spoken to by a dead person.” Here he is describing the first line of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died.” From the very first line in this poem she explains that she is dead. Then comparing her writing in this poem compared to the writing in “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain” the description of emotion is much more distinguished and passionate in the poem she is writing from a living perspective. In her poem which she is writing from a dead perspective it seems to be much less emotional and more mystical and anticipating for what will come next. We can see this sense of emotion in the second poem as well, in the very first line she writes “I felt a funeral, in my brain” here we see just the second word in this poem is the word “felt”. Throughout this entire poem she is describing feelings and emotion, and in the first poem she explains what she’s hearing and observing rather than what she is feeling. This makes a big difference of the sense of emotions in each of these two poems. Elizabeth Thomason in her article writes: “Like many of Dickinson 's other poems, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" explores the workings of the human mind under stress and attempts to replicate the stages of a mental breakdown through the overall metaphor of a funeral.” What Emily Thomason writes here supports my belief of this