What are the decisions the poet has made about form and meter? How do these decisions affect meaning?

Let's start with the basics. The poem is divided into four separate stanzas, and each stanza is four lines long. The poem's rhythm is iambic. This means that Dickinson alternates her syllable stresses from unstressed to stressed over and over again. I'll use the first line of the second stanza as an example. I will also mark the stressed syllables in bold.

The Eyes / around /—had wrung / them dry—

Notice that line has four iambic feet. This is called iambic tetrameter. I would like to say that the entire poem is written this way; however, Dickinson alternates tetrameter with trimeter. Lines one and three of each stanza are tetrameter, and lines two and four are trimeter. The poem also has a lot of dashes in it. These dashes make the poem read choppily. On one hand, the poem has a beautifully regular iambic rhythm that really gives the poem a smooth flow; however, the dashes interrupt this flow. This is perfect for this poem, because it's about a person peacefully dying with loved ones around; however, an annoying fly messes up and interrupts this peaceful process. The poem's great flow gets annoyingly interrupted with all of the dashes, and that is like the fly interrupting the peaceful death.