The second stanza focuses on the concerned onlookers, whose strained eyes and gathered breath emphasize their concentration in the face of a sacred event: the arrival of the "King," who is death. ![]() In the first stanza, the death-room's stillness contrasts with a fly's buzz that the dying person hears, and the tension pervading the scene is likened to the pauses within a storm. By describing the moment of her death, the speaker lets us know that she has already died. The first line is as arresting an opening as one could imagine. The very popular "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died" (465) is often seen as representative of Emily Dickinson's style and attitudes. ![]() Her poems centering on death and religion can be divided into four categories: those focusing on death as possible extinction, those dramatizing the question of whether the soul survives death, those asserting a firm faith in immortality, and those directly treating God's concern with people's lives and destinies. Years ago, Emily Dickinson's interest in death was often criticized as being morbid, but in our time readers tend to be impressed by her sensitive and imaginative handling of this painful subject. Life in a small New England town in Dickinson's time contained a high mortality rate for young people as a result, there were frequent death-scenes in homes, and this factor contributed to her preoccupation with death, as well as her withdrawal from the world, her anguish over her lack of romantic love, and her doubts about fulfillment beyond the grave. Other nineteenth-century poets, Keats and Whitman are good examples, were also death-haunted, but few as much as Emily Dickinson. Most of these poems also touch on the subject of religion, although she did write about religion without mentioning death. ![]() But over half of them, at least partly, and about a third centrally, feature it. Even a modest selection of Emily Dickinson's poems reveals that death is her principal subject in fact, because the topic is related to many of her other concerns, it is difficult to say how many of her poems concentrate on death.
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