Ms. Harris
English Comp II
11 November 2011
Emily Dickinson
I. Emily Dickinson was an introvert who wrote poems about life, love and death. Dickinson showed her feelings of death and Desire using unusual scenario’s that cause the reader to stretch their thinking and go beyond superficial thought. Emily Dickinson uses imagery, Form, and settings in her poems in “I Heard a Fly Buzz when I Died” to set the tone of the poem.
II. Dickinson uses imagery in “I Heard a Fly Buzz when I Died” to set the tone for this poem.
A. Dickinson works hard and fast to give us a sense of what the atmosphere is like in this room. She wants to build up a sense of how quiet, calm, and stifling it is around this deathbed. Maybe everyone has experienced a death, so she compares the situation to another one that everyone might be more familiar with.
B. We don’t actually get to see who else is in the room with the dying speaker, but she does help us out by telling us that there are "Eyes around." This helps us to fill in the blanks of the scene. At first we just had a dying person and a fly, but now we can start to imagine the room where this is taking place, complete with crying onlookers.
C. When it comes to this image of "the King." She is referring to death itself, which runs the show. This could have a more specifically religious meaning. Such as reference to God or Jesus
Dickinson’s lyric poem uses form, meter, and scheme to convey its tone,
A. Trimeter and tetrameter iambic lines, four stresses in the first and third lines of each stanza, three in the second and fourth lines. A rhythmic insertion of the long dash to interrupt the meter; and an ABCB rhyme scheme.
B. All the rhymes before the final stanza are half-rhymes (Room/Storm, firm/Room, be/Fly), while only the rhyme in the final stanza is a full rhyme (me/see). Dickinson uses this technique to build tension; a sense of true completion comes only with the speaker’s death.
C. A lyric poem is a short, song like poem that expresses someone’s thoughts or feelings which by the end of the poem where death is quickly approaching you feel the tone is the poem. It was evident that the person dying had plenty of other things to think about but the buzz from the fly seem to distract them, all the way up to the point that the speaker could not see to see.
III. 3rd Paragraph Overview
a. 3rd Paragraph Supporting Details
b. 3rd Paragraph Supporting Details
IV. Conclusion
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