I Heard a Fly Buzz when I Died

Source

Source: Project Gutenberg eBook #12242, Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete Source URL: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12242 Public domain basis: Complete text of the three posthumous series edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson (1890, 1891, 1896), with their editorial titles and regularized punctuation. Public domain. Coverage: Complete individual poem extracted from parent edition poems-of-emily-dickinson at bytes 169594-170123; checksum e2e93246bd9f282f5935bc7a141aed6261606f0966619daaa071e29ba9ad1661.

# I Heard a Fly Buzz when I Died

I Heard a Fly Buzz when I Died

XLVI.

DYING.

I heard a fly buzz when I died; The stillness round my form Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry, And breaths were gathering sure For that last onset, when the king Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portion of me I Could make assignable, -- and then There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, Between the light and me; And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see.