By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Emily Dickinson (1830-86) wrote many poems about death. She also wrote often, and insightfully, about depression, and ‘It was not Death, for I stood up’ is a powerful evocation of what it feels like to be gripped and paralysed by this debilitating emotion. Below is the poem, along with some notes towards an analysis of it. If it was not Death, what was it? A kind of death, at any rate.