My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun By Emily Dickinson

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Recommended: How does Emily Dickinson explore the theme of death

Life is Death
The theme of death is no stranger to Emily Dickinson’s poems, death appears in countless poems. Dickinson used death as the theme for many of her poems, yet it ‘s meaning is never quite the same. Dickenson's poems trough the use of metaphors figurative language, connotations, and imagery give a different perspective on death. In Dickenson's poems, death can be a place of rest for those who suffer in life and often personified far different from a traditional dreadful denotation. Dickinson shows how tangled life and death really are, and how life cannot exist without death. In “After Great pain, a formal Feeling comes,” death is characterized as a destined eternal harmony. Similarly in "My Life had stood a Loaded Gun" Dickinson …show more content…

Emily uses imagery to showcase the idea of a funeral and give us an image of what it feels to be dead while we're still alive, "the nerves sit ceremonious like tombs." The connotation of tomb shares similar qualities death, such as motionless, quietness and serenity. We further see and begin to feel a lack of feeling, as the speaker lives through life in numbness from hurt. “The stiff Heart questions 'was it He, that bore,” after a decaying life due to immense physical or emotional pain the heart begins to doubt in God, religion and faith in general. We can see that the heart doubts God because the speaker is dying. The speaker struggles to understand which emotions to “feel,” and which emotions she should discard. The speaker does not know how to cope with her inevitable death. The speaker cannot understand why “god” has permitted to let her experience so intense pain and why she is dying. The speaker seeks an answer to these questions, answers the speaker seeks while pleading with God. In “After Great pain, a formal Feeling comes,” death is only and end to her suffering and pain, pain that causes her to feel “numb” in life. Dickinson personifies death as an eternal place of harmony, “A Quartz contentment, like a stone.” The speaker is content as a stone is characterized; she no longer feels no pain. The reader questioned why she had to die in such an agonizing way, yet the speaker at the end realizes the ability to die, ends her

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