Essay
Analysing 'It was not Death for I stood up'
Analysing 'It was not Death for I stood up' by Emily Dickinson, an A grade exam style answer.
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‘It was not Death, for I stood up’Explore how Emily Dickinson presents ideas and feelings about the mind/soul/death in ‘It was not
Death, for I stood up’ and make connections with one or two other poems from your collection.
You should consider Dickinson’s use of poetic and stylistic techniques and significant literary or other
relevant contexts.
The speaker attempts to understand her own condition and the cause of her torment. Dickinson
uses concrete images to describe an unbearable and nameless ‘It’ that seems to refer to a state of
mind.
‘It was not death, for I stood up’ is an example of apophasis, where Dickinson denies importance or
relevance with negatives to define an emotional state. She continues this through the parallel
syntax ‘It was not Death...It was not Night’. Here, the more she forcefully negates metaphors with
the repeated ‘it was not…’ the more dire she becomes. The series of negation generates conflict
between the sensory and reason. Dickinson uses the juxtaposing plural noun ‘I felt siroccos - crawl’
with the noun phrase ‘marble feet’. The verb collocation of ‘flesh’, ‘crawl[ing]’ connotes discomfort
and agitation. At the same time she describes herself with the abstract noun ‘cool’, totally put
together, strong and aloof as marble. Stanza three pulls together the possibilities she eliminated; "it
tasted like all of them." She is using a synaesthetic image (tasting death, darkness, and cold) to show
that her state affects every aspect of her life and that different states have become merged and
indistinguishable; in other words, she is in a chaotic state. However while trying to generate an
answer through sensory perception yet her torment is still the unidentified, ambiguous pronoun ‘it’.
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