Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1930

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” maintains a regular iambic tetrameter line (consisting of four iambic feet) throughout, except for the first and last couplets, which break at midpoint into two dimeter lines (consisting of two feet) each. “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” rhymes in couplets, again except for Lines 1-4 and Lines 13-16, which rhyme ABXB. The poem’s misattribution to Emily Dickinson may come from its tetrameter, its use of dashes to punctuate, and its subject and imagery. Dickinson more often composed in hymnal stanza, which uses alternating rhyme and line lengths.

Numerous sources refer to the poem as a sonnet. No version of the poem is a sonnet, though one of the many versions produced by Mary Frye does have 16 lines. None of the shorter versions can be considered a curtal sonnet; curtal sonnets follow a Petrarchan rhyme pattern, only with fewer lines. The original printing of “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” as “Immortality” has 16 lines—essentially 12 tetrameter lines, with the first and last couplets broken into four lines in order to create dramatic space visually and orally.

Anaphora

Anaphora is a rhetorical device wherein a series of neighboring clauses repeatedly begin with the same sequence of words. The effect is emphatic. The speaker’s repetition of “I am” at the beginning of half the lines in the poem creates a kind of incantation or spell, an effect that can be at once soothing and uncanny. The speaker asserts their existence repeatedly, exhorting the mourner audience to turn away from the grave. Each “I am” emphasizes the speaker’s continued and widespread presence. This listing kind of anaphora echoes Biblical passages like the Beatitudes, as well as Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Both rhythmic and rhetorically persuasive, the repetition in the poem makes it easier to memorize and to visualize, probably contributing to the work’s longevity and popularity.

Metaphor

A metaphor—the most common and most important figure of speech—is a rhetorical device wherein someone refers to one thing by mentioning another. In many ways, the poem’s central theme concerns metaphor—one thing reconstituted as another—as the path to immortality. The speaker’s voice stands in for the departed person; the poem itself speaks for someone who no longer has a voice. The speaker tells the reader/mourner not to go to their grave and cry. Even the mourner’s graveside tears may be a metaphor for grief itself. The speaker intends to console the bereaved reader, not just to discourage the reader from visiting the physical grave. The speaker asks the reader to maintain their presence by perceiving them in every place but the grave, especially in the movements of nature, the shifting of time, the transformations of life. The poem conveys with each choice of metaphor that immortality derives from mutability, the taking on of new forms. Things end only when they cannot move, change, and adapt. The final metaphor, “I am the day transcending night” (Line 12), embodies the voice of the speaker in nature’s supremely consistent image, effectively promising that as long as the sun comes up again, the speaker remains alive and present.