Locating the Animal in Emily Dickinson’s Poem “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -”

The article explores the problem of poetically presenting animality without reinforcing the conventional human/animal distinction. The article argues that the poem addresses the issue of locating animality within Homo sapiens by its poetic rendering of an interaction between a dying human and an insect. The insect’s presence makes the vision of immortality inaccessible to the lyrical speaker. Locating animality is achieved by undermining heroic narratives, which leads to a fuller revelation of the human’s finitude. The animal within the human being turns out to be located in their finitude determined by the mortal biological constitution and embeddedness in a semiotic system.