Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep

“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.