Analysis Of It Was Not Death For I Stood Up By Emily Dickinson

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Brooke Vorhis
Ms. Vanadore
English III H
6 October 2017

SSR Entry Three: It was not Death, for I Stood up.
MLA Citation:
Dickinson, Emily, “It was not Death, for I stood up (355).” Poetry Foundation, 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44085/it-was-not-death-for-i-stood-up-355. 5
Oct. 2017.

Overall Purpose: In the poem, “It was not Death, for I stood up”, Dickinson provides us a sense of her overall emotional state of hopelessness, death, and depression.

Evidence to support the theme:
In stanza one, “It was not death, for I stood up” (1), represents her feelings of confusion because she feels as if she were dead, but she is able to stand. This sentence sets the tone for the readers to grasp her feelings towards death.
In stanza two, “It was not frost, for on my flesh/ I felt siroccos crawl,/ Nor fire, for just my marble feet,/ Could keep a chancel cool” (4-8), she explains these images of her body as if she were a corpse. …show more content…

This further expresses her feelings of death because she describes a burial as if it was her own funeral.

Historical/biographical context:
Dickinson was born in Amherst, MA on December 10, 1830. She was an American poet and her poems were about death, depression, and hopelessness. She secretly wrote these poems which were found later by her sister after her death. In addition, her poems were written during the era of the American Civil War. Even though, her family was very involved in the community, she never married and lived a life of isolation. She was not prominent in any religious category which was unusual during this time period.

MLA

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