Emily Dickinson for the CSET

third person perspective) in this poem.

The aspect that is first apparently ambiguous is the rhythm of the first line. Using traditional meter notation, one can see that accentuation can occur as

This is certainly the rhythmic pattern used throughout the rest of the poem; however, the rhythm of the first line seems to work much better in a completely unexpected form:

This at first seems somewhat awkward, but at least to me, the rhythm of the latter template for this single line works better. Thus we see the first, and most minor case of ambiguity. The possibility and even likelihood of this abrupt change in rhythm serves to increase the poem’s ominous feeling.

The next apparent ambiguity is the time frame in which the poem takes place. Do the words “when I died” at the end of the first line belong with “I heard a Fly buzz,” or with “The Stillness…”? Both views are self-consistent with the rest of the poem, but their consequences are quite contradictory, and the two options are mutually exclusive. Were the phrase to belong with the rest of the first line (the view that I am inclined towards), one reads the rest of the poem as though the narrator were already dead, perhaps waiting for her soul to depart (possibly the Stillness between the Heaves of storm). The other option produces rather strange jumps in time: it is almost necessary to equate the first occurrence of the buzzing fly with the ‘interposing’ fly on line 12.

Diction is the vessel in which it can be argued that the next most important ambiguities lie. At first, the assertion that “King” on line 7 can mean anything other than Christ, or the ‘King of Kings’ seems rather empty, however the only two pieces of evidence supporting the ‘fact’ that it is indeed Christ being referred to, are that the gathering in the death-room was expecting the “King”, and that Emily Dickinson lived in a time of Christians, a creed to which she could