Emily Dickinson for the CSET

have been ascribed. Both of these pieces of evidence also support the counter claim to the “King” as Christ.

Other than Christ, one could only mean the King or Lord of the Flies, also known as Be’elzebub. Not only is the Lord of the Flies prominent in Judeo-Christian mythology, featuring very pertinently in the biblical book Revelation, but he is the one expected to remove the soul from the body of the deceased, thus rendering our two pieces of evidence rather ineffective in asserting the “King” as Christ. The incessant repetition of images of flies only makes this ambiguity that much more poignant and pivotal to the poem.

The final stanza contains what I consider to be the most intriguing if not perhaps the most important ambiguities that Dickinson used her mastery of diction to convey. On first reading, one assumes that “Windows” are clearly meant to conjure images of lightconveyors. Our eyes are said to be “the windows to the world”. Looking more closely, one sees that this is not necessarily the only meaning intended by Dickinson. In practical usage, a window is not meant merely to let light in, but also to keep air out (or in, depending). Without the latter use, why have walls at all? Without the former why have the windows at all? The absence of one use negates the presence of the other. With all the images of air Dickinson includes, how can we deny that a barrier of air was not as important to her as a pathway for light? In a room of death, would one really invite in the “Stillness of the Air,” the “Heaves of storm,” let alone the flies, which call the air their home?

Another aerial image serves as the other important ambiguity of the last stanza: Blue. Does Dickinson only seek to convey the infinity of the sky, only to say nothing else about the sky in the last stanza? Our last image of the sky clearly showed it to us in a color other than blue, we were in the gray skies – the calm “Between the Heaves of storm”. The Oxford English Dictionary shows usages dating back to as early as 1783 of the word “blue” as the emotion of distress with which we presently associate it. According to the OED, in the 19th century, in addition to meaning sad and depressed, blue was the color associated with fear and panic. Could this not be the “Blue” Emily Dickinson was describing? The juxtaposition of “uncertain” and “stumbling” to “Blue” only serve to lend this interpretation credit.

The final line is quite puzzling, and I will come back to it when briefly looking at the enigmatic aspects lending the poem its power. There are two possible interpretations of “I could not see to see”. The first is the more mundane: that the narrator, with the failing light of the windows