It Was Not Death For I Stood Up Analysis

Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous poets of early America. She wrote many poems during the Civil War and the period where many people were heading to the West. Death was prominent in society and much of her writing is about death. Her writing about death is different from that of authors because she writes casually about her own death as she would any other event in her life. She is not writing about her physical death, but rather a lack of life. Dickinson’s “It was not Death, for I stood up” is a contrast between her depression and the potential of death. The first stanza of “It was not Death, for I stood up” sets the tone of the poem as somber and questioning. Dickinson writes about an experience that feels like death but is not. The first two lines “It was not Death, for I stood up, / And all the dead lie down” (Dickinson, 1, 2) set the scene for an event or emotion that she went through. Dickinson feels as though she is dead, but she knows that she isn't because of her ability to stand up. She …show more content…
She writes “As if my life were shaven, / And fitted to a frame” (13,14) to portray herself as a toy in someone else’s game of life. Her life is “shaven” to expose it at it's most bare and fitted to a frame to be stuck that way for eternity. At this point in the poem she feels that her life is confusing and out of her control. She writes “And could not breathe without a key”(15) to extrapolate her fear of being trapped in her life. She is unsure what her life is, but she knows that it suffocates her and exposes her in unnatural ways. In the first stanza she wrote that “it was not night”(3) but in the fourth stanza she writes “‘twas like midnight”(16). This contrast shows a changing perspective on her life. She is beginning to understand and accept that her life is hard, and instead of denying the darkness she admits that her life was “like