Emily Dickinson for the CSET

could not see the fly (or whatever she was seeing), and slipped into death. The second interpretation becomes apparent when one considers what it is to know one is alive. Is Dickinson saying rather, that she is dead, and therefore cannot know it? Rather than seeing blackness, she is not seeing at all?

This leads us to the thematic ambiguity. Was the underlying sense of death one filled with fear and paranoia? Or was death the final peace? The decisive words are all in the ambiguities mentioned above. In one extreme, one could interpret the King as the King or Lord of the Flies, the buzzing as panicked and fearful, as the fly came into her vision, filled it, and became all of its blackness? The other extreme would be to see the King as Christ, and the flies merely annoyances. The third stanza seems to lend this interpretation some credit as well. The finality and surety with which the narrator has willed her possessions away has no sense of panic or fear… at least until the fly comes.

I have no doubt that Emily Dickinson intended to convey both feelings to the reader, but I think the latter sense of peace was the one she was more strongly inclined towards. The structure of the rhyme scheme is what gives the peace its finality (and perhaps poetically, finality its peace). In each stanza, the only rhymes are the final words of the second and fourth lines, and in the first three, one sees Dickinson’s signature of disturbing ‘almost-rhymes’. Just as “storm” in this scheme rhymes with “Room,” so does “firm”. Without any stretch of the imagination, we see that the first and second stanzas’ rhymes use the same sound. This is validated when one looks at the third and forth stanza’s rhymes: “be | fly | me | see.” Now, not only has Dickinson created her somewhat ominous sense of close-rhymes, but she has further created a sense of division between the first and last halves of the poem, through her use of rhyme. This is what intensifies and calls attention to the perfect last rhyme of “me” and “see.” That this last rhyme is the only real rhyme in this poem, next to the three previous, disturbing close-rhymes gives the final aspect of peace and tranquility to the poem. Besides this, the statement that she “could not see to see” contains within itself a certain sense of peace when looked at in a peaceful light. When seen this way, the statement can only be an allusion to the absence not only of existence, but awareness of existence.

In any poem, the misinterpretation of even one pivotal word can reverse the meaning milked out of it, so it is troubling when we see enigmatic phrases which cannot be conclusively be ascribed any meaning at all. “The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—“ is one such phrase. Did