Dickinson's poem offers a dispassionate experience of the moment of death. She describes her intense, heightened awareness of contrasts between 'the Stillness in the Room' and the activity of the fly, the final meticulous attention paid to arranging one's estate and the 'uncertain stumbling' of the fly, and the silent breathing of mourners against the fly's loud buzzing.

With death imminent, the soul may wait in anticipation for 'when the King/Be witnessed - in the Room -'. In the event, however, it is the physical intrusion of a household fly that is witnessed, with the creature appreciated as the one responsible for the final loss of both the physical light and the light that has symbolised life:

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 -

The interviewees are Wendy Cope, Lavinia Greenlaw, Tom Paulin, Iain Sinclair and Matthew Sweeney.

www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1175
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