The Making of an Image: Emily Dickinson's Blue Fly

Emily Dickinson's startling image, “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died,” incorporates aspects of Hawthorne's “common house-fly” in Seven Gables, which echoes elements of Tennyson's image in “Mariana.” Aware of her predecessors' images, Dickinson, through her characteristic synaesthetic interfusion of sensory experiences, “translates” her “blue fly” into something new and strange.