Death is certain in life. No individual is guaranteed to live forever, at least on earth; therefore, death as well as immortality is a concern to every individual, including Emily Dickinson. She as well as many other writers creates images of death in their writings. Death poses many questions: Does the soul survive death? Do people become extinct? What is death's purpose? No individual can really know the answers to these questions until death is experienced for oneself. Dickinson wrote about death in more than five hundred different poems. Her poems about death generally fall into three categories: physical, personified, and social (Ervin).
             The poem "I heard a Fly buzz – when I died" falls under Dickinson's first category. It discusses a lady lying on her death bed. It allows the reader see the narrator's last thoughts before her physical death. Dickinson wrote: "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" (Wolff 225). The stillness in the room where she was dying contrasts with the buzzing of a fly. The narrator was being watched by mourners that, too, were silent and still. They knew "the king" (death) was about to take her away. Dickinson's closing lines stated: "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" (225). The buzzing of this fly intervened right before the narrator's death. The fly was between the narrator and the light. This hinted that her physical death had arrived. It also epitomized the physical life she was leaving behind. "At the end of 'I heard a Fly buzz', the speaker has been winnowed by death, and the integral soul has been scattered outward and destroyed by dispersal" (227). The final line lets the reader know that t...