[In the following essay, Bachinger presents a reading of Dickinson's “I heard a Fly Buzz” as a response to John Donne's Sermon 78—in which she equates the fly with God.]

“Why is that ‘Fly’ in the room? … And why, further, is death (the moment of death) personified as the ‘King,’ if that's what's being personified?” asks George Monteiro (The Explicator, 43[1], 44). Seeking a precedent for the conjunction of Fly and King, he notes that according to folklore, flies are permitted to dine at kings' tables because once, by mimicking nails at Christ's crucifixion, they spared him more. Consequently, Monteiro concludes, the conjunction of Fly and King was not Dickinson's invention, but “the grotesquerie of the conceptual meaning was undoubtedly the poet's” (45).

Monteiro is, I believe, on the right track in proposing a religious explication of Dickinson's symbolism, but I part from him by looking for the answers to his questions in theology rather than in folklore. Presumably one reason for Dickinson's personifying of Death as the King, “if that's what's being personified,” was that she recalled Job 18:14 where Death is titled the King of Terrors. And the rest of her poem also reflects traditional doctrinal Christian writings. Indeed, I suggest that it has a specific seventeenth century clerical source to which it makes a typically Dickinsonian reply.

The sermon (No. 80) that John Donne preached in St. Paul's Cathedral at the funeral of Sir William Cokayne on December 12, 1626, was an appendage to a series of three on the theme of bodily resurrection. The second and third, being numbered 77 and 78, lie close by the Cokayne sermon in the third volume of an edition available to Dickinson: The Works of John Donne, D. D., ed. Henry Alford, London: John Parker, 1839. Their motto is taken from 1 Corinthians 15:29, ending: “if the dead rise not at all, why are they then baptized dead?” Anyone reading them becomes immersed for many pages in a reception ambience that might tempt any writer to create a dead but risen narrator.

In the Cokayne sermon, Donne carries his belief in resurrection to a logical conclusion. He chides Martha for having exclaimed, “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother [Lazarus] had not died” (John 11:21). He argues that she should have rejoiced, saying instead: “The Lord was here, my brother is not dead; not dead in the eyes and ears of God!” (489). Dickinson gives us not only a narrator who, precisely by narrating posthumously, demonstrates that, at least in Donne's sense, she (he) is not dead, but one whose recollections of her death are so autobiographically detailed that they function to affirm the traditional Christian dogma that man survives after death not merely as a soul but with all his individual physical particularities intact. In his Cokayne sermon, Donne even feels justified in asserting: “This resurrection of my body shows me the resurrection of my soul” (599).

Moreover, it will be noted that Donne makes the Lord the agent of resurrection at the time of death when he amends Martha's “Lord, if thou hadst been here” to “The Lord was here.” And in the Christian tradition, as in Donne's writings, the Lord is commonly titled the King of Kings. Death is thus a moment when the King of Terrors is defeated by the King of Kings, and the equanimity with which Dickinson's narrator awaits death strongly suggests that the “King” who is to be “witnessed” then is as much or more the Lord as he is Death. It is the Lord who guarantees her the “last Onset” or the resurrection.

An oddly interesting illustration of Donne's position being reiterated in an early nineteenth century poem that may have been well known to Dickinson is the first in Byron's Hours of Idleness: “On the Death of a Young Lady.” There Byron takes himself to task as Donne does Martha. Having expostulated at the pitilessness of the “King of Terrors,” Byron rebukes himself for almost arraigning Heaven: “Ah! no far fly from me attempts so vain.” He then expresses confidence that the dead girl yet lives in the company of angels in Heaven. Dickinson evidently went along, though irascibly, with the doctrine of personal resurrection. For despite her rebelliousness, as Barbara Mossberg notes in Emily Dickinson, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, “in no poem does Dickinson imagine herself being any place else” than Heaven after death, a “stifling” Heaven in which she repeats her own particular experience of “Sunday and school” (121). She clearly had the conceptual horizon to invent a posthumous idiosyncratic narrator. Whether, in addition to sharing Byron's faith in a hereafter, she paid any attention to the fact he had conjoined “King” and one form of “fly” and by a knight's move of thought incorporated them in her own poem, I doubt for there is a much more trenchant reason for her employing those words.

If Donne's resurrection sermons provided the general impulse for the creation of Dickinson's dead but quick narrator, the final nudge probably came from the work that Alford places immediately after the Cokayne sermon, Donne's “Devotions on Emergent Occasions and Several Steps in my Sickness.” The dedication that precedes this quaint collation claims that Donne was moved to compose it in imitation of King Hezekiath, who “writ the meditations of his sickness after his sickness” (494, my emphasis). In presenting a narrator writing a meditation on his death after his death, Dickinson may have simply followed Donne's (and Hezekiath's) lead. Her characterization of death as the “last Onset” suggests that she did. For Donne begins his dedication by declaring, “I have had three births [or Onsets]; one, natural, when I came into the world; one supernatural, when I entered into the ministry; and now, a preternatural birth, in returning to life, from this sickness” (494). A last Onset, his birth into eternal Paradise, still awaits him. Dickinson's inversion of end into onset may clearly derive from Donne's depiction of aging as a succession of births.

In stanza three, her narrator reveals that all is proceeding in an orderly fashion. The will has been made. Death is awaited with tranquility. The situation and its outcome exactly parallel those in a passage at the end of Donne's Sermon 78:

Compare thy temporal, and thy spiritual state … If thou have set thy state in order, and make a will before, and have nothing to do at last, but to add a codicil, this is soon dispatched at last; but if thou leave all till till [sic], then, it may prove a heavy business. So if thou have repented before, and settled thyself in a religious course before, and have nothing to do then … God shall imprint in thee a cupio dissolvei, St. Paul's, not only contentedness, but desire to be dissolved; and God shall give thee a glorious resurrection, yes an ascension into heaven before thy death, and thou shalt see thyself in possession of his eternal kingdom, before thy bodily eyes be shut.

(439f)

Dickinson's narrator both experiences a cupio dissolvei as the light fails and, before the bodily eyes are shut, sees the Fly. Its “Blue” and “uncertain stumbling Buzz” put us, Dickinson is saying, “in possession of his eternal kingdom” before we actually die. She takes Donne's assurance that there can be an ascension into Heaven before death and adds to it the Rousseauian concept that certain natural phenomena witness God. And she chose a Fly as the earthly symbol of the eternal kingdom, I suggest, because although agreeing in general with Donne, she considered he errs in maligning the lowly despised fly in his Cokayne sermon. There he confesses that he is saddened by the ease with which even the most devoted, like himself, are distracted from God during their prayers: “I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his angels, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly … a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer” (476f). Dickinson's poem is her very graphic answer to this passage, which became widely enough parroted to win a place in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

For Dickinson, Donne is wrong—or inconsistent, since he begins one of his prayers with “O eternal and most gracious God, who hast made little things to signify great” (602). For Dickinson, that little Fly is God. He who hears its “uncertain stumbling Buzz” and sees its “Blue,” a favorite Romantic color for Eternity, does not neglect God, the King of Kings, but enters Heaven before death. The Fly and the King are conjoined for the very good reason that in Dickinson's eschatology they become one and the same. Grotesque? If so, only in being a logical development, even more downright than Donne's, of others' premises.