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Jenna's Favorite/Least Favorite Poems
“I heard a fly buzz when I died”
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.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable, and then
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.
I liked this poem because it gives a tragic ominous meaning about death.
Repetition is used in the poem when the word stillness is repeated. It shows how permanent death is. The stillness in the
air reflects the stillness of the people in the room. The simile of the storm shows how storms rise and fall in strength like
the people’s grief. Personification is seen when Dickinson writes the breaths were growing firm. I liked how the poem
talked about the King as in the coming of a higher being to take the dead person to Heaven. Fly is capitalized because it
symbolizes the Devil. The Devil gets in the way of the person who wants to join the light. She uses common symbolism and repetition
of words in her poems to portray a story which is what I like about her works.
"Nature, The Gentlest Mother"
Nature, the gentlest mother,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest,
Her admonition mild
In forest and the hill
By traveller is heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel
Or too impetuous bird.
How fair her conversation,
A summer afternoon,--
Her household, her assembly;
And when the sun goes down
Her voice among the aisles
Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket,
The most unworthy flower.
When all the children sleep
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps;
Then, bending from the sky
With infinite affection
And infiniter care,
Her golden finger on her lip,
Wills silence everywhere.
I didn’t like this poem because it seemed so random. Her other works are sad and dark while this one is fruity and about
nature. I liked Emily because she had a mysterious side and she seemed to have been scared and alone but at the same time
heartbroken. Then this poem about nature shows up and it made me wonder what she was trying to prove. Personification is seen
in the form of making nature a mother. Rhyme is seen with heard and bird at the end of stanza two. Repetition of the word
infinite paints a powerful picture about how much a a loving mother nature can be.
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