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The vision one imagines when they read Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died” is not one of happiness but of sorrow and motionless pain. The scene of death presents itself from the first line and continues to grab you throughout the course. The imagery painted in your mind is that of a room where stillness fills the air. We are affected by the sudden appearance and actions of an ordinary fly; which becomes the symbolic figure throughout the four stanzas.

The room is silent and still except for that of the buzzing of the ordinary fly. The poem describes a quiet period between "heaves," suggesting disturbance proceeded this moment and that more cataclysms will follow. This shows a moment of expectation, and that of waiting. The stillness still fills the air and the watchers gathered around the speaker are silent. And still the only sound is the fly's buzzing. Here we find some kind of inner peace with the speaker; because the tone remains calm and the speaker’s sequence of events are short and factual.

The people witnessing the speaker have exhausted their grief (their eyes are "wrung dry" of tears); which show that this site was bound to happen and they were fully aware of the inevitable. The speaker’s breathing indicates that "that last onset" or death is about to happen. When “last onset” is defined in Christian terms, "last" means an end and “onset” means beginning. Death is the beginning of eternal life for Christians. So was the speaker referring to the end of human life but the beginning of a spiritual life? Death does bring revelation. This why in the next line ("the king / Be witnessed in his power.") the speaker chooses to make us wonder if the fly has become the taker of life or the symbol that life is ending. Clayton Eshleman, writer for the American Poetry Review writes in summary,
“The fly that then appears may be taken as a caricature of God or Death; it may also evoke this ancient fly lore: the fly as...