On this date Emily Dickinson died (1830 – 1886).

Frye in his essay “Emily Dickinson”:

Like Blake, with whom she has been compared ever since Higginson’s preface of the 1890 volume, Emily Dickinson shows us two contrary states of the human soul, a vision of innocence and a vision of “experience”, or ordinary life.  One is a vision of “Presence,” the other of “Place”; in one the primary fact of life is partnership, in the other it is parting.  Thus she may say, depending on the context, both “Were Departure Separation, there would be neither Nature nor Art, for there would be no World” and “Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell.” (CW 17, 266)

An adaptation of “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” after the jump.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzK0mQER28A