My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun Figurative Language

600 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Emily dickinson literary criticism

In Emily Dickinson’s dramatic monolog “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun,” a journey of a spiritual awakening is expressed. Dickinson writes about how a child of God is found then goes out to find other lost souls. Literary Critic Gregory Palmerino indicates “‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun’ maybe Dickinson’s most expansive poem if not her magnum opus, yet I do believe there is a discernible meaning – a center – to be found there. That center is her struggle with God” (84). Dickinson develops her poem using sound, symbolism, and figurative language. Dickinson is known for her poems not only for their controversies but also their sound. The tone very serious yet calming because the narrator will receive internal life if she stays on the path of righteousness. Although this poem does not have a rhyming scheme, “there are quite a few words that do rhyme (also, e.g., “die” – “I” and “day” – “away”)” (Bauer 127). “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun” is written in iambic tetrameter followed by iambic trimeter, also known as, common meter. The famous hymnal …show more content…

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun” (1). Dickinson does not mean that the narrator is actually a “Loaded Gun,” but possess a quality like one: full of power yet unused. When God finally finds the narrator/“Loaded Gun,” he knows he can use her/it to spread the Word of God. After the “hunt,” the narrator states, “And do I smile, such cordial light / Upon the Valley glow / It is as a Vesuvian face / Had let its pleasure through” (9-12). In biblical terms, volcanoes erupting are a sign of God’s anger, but according to the bible, “To the Israelites, the glory of the LORD looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain.” (Ex 24:17). God can also show His approval through volcanoes. Dickinson’s words could be interpreted as meaning that God finds the work that the narrator is doing is

Show More
Related

  • My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun

    612 Words  | 2 Pages

    Emily Dickerson’s poem, “My Life Stood – A Loaded Gun” is about a gun which is a personification of it's owner. The pleasure the gun takes in violence represents its owner's pleasure in violence.

    Read More

  • An Analysis of Poems 585 and 754

    1006 Words  | 3 Pages

    In both poems, Emily Dickinson uses diction to provide the reader the opportunity to see inanimate objects with some human qualities, first in a determined, powerful train and then in a devoted, non-feeling gun. Though these are inanimate objects, the reader can get a sense of the influences and contributions they give to man. The train made a great impact on travel by allowing him to cover great distances in shorter times. It appears that this iron horse could take man anywhere. In Dickinson’s time the power of trains was an amazement in itself. With the rifle, man has control of something quite powerful, something that can kill but cannot be killed. With her skillful and interesting word choice, Dickinson brings to light the amazing strength of one object, the train, and the fearful power of another, the gun.

    Read More

  • Comparison of Emily Dickinson’s: I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died, and Because I Could Not Stop for Death

    603 Words  | 2 Pages

    Dickinson, Emily. “Because I could not stop for Death.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and writing. Seventh Edition. X.J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia. Saddle River. Pearson Education, 2013. 777. Print.

    Read More

  • Comparing and Contrasting Dickinson’s Poems, Because I Could Not Stop for Death and I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died

    846 Words  | 2 Pages

    Comparing and Contrasting Dickinson’s Poems, Because I Could Not Stop for Death and I Heard a Fly Buzz - When I Died

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson 1489 Analysis

    1304 Words  | 3 Pages

    One of Emily Dickinson’s greatest skills is taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. In this sense, she reshapes how her readers view her subjects and the meaning that they have in the world. She also has the ability to assign a word to abstractness, making her poems seemingly vague and unclear on the surface. Her poems are so carefully crafted that each word can be dissected and the reader is able to uncover intense meanings and images. Often focusing on more gothic themes, Dickinson shows an appreciation for the natural world in a handful of poems. Although Dickinson’s poem #1489 seems disoriented, it produces a parallelism of experience between the speaker and the audience that encompasses the abstractness and unexpectedness of an event.

    Read More

  • Funeral In My Brain Diction

    524 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the last stanza, Dickinson uses the metaphor of standing on a plank or board over a precipice, to relate the speaker's fall into irrationality. In other words, her clasp on reasonability was uncertain. The last word of the poem, "then--," does not conclude or stop her undergo but leaves her future left unknown. Not only does the last stanza finalize the sense of the poem, it escalates the psychological effect on the poem. The end of the poem does not only leave the reader in wonder, but it also leaves them in the state of curiosity and

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson Madness And Sense Analysis

    172 Words  | 1 Pages

    19th century poet, Emily Dickinson was seen as a scandal in that she had chosen to live in a different manner than others of her time – socially reclusive, spending her years in solitude, she never got married, nor had any children, and as so, her voice was unheard. In justification of her societal seclusion, poem 435 is a defense on her behalf for the majority that see her as a misconduct. Dickinson’s view of madness and sense serve as a metaphor for the differentiating line between sense and sanity.

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death

    727 Words  | 2 Pages

    She chooses this arrangement of verse in order to ordain a religious aspect into the poem, which does well to suite the theme and what she is fond of. As the recollection of the speaker’s death progresses, Dickinson uses the stanzas to mark the stages of the

    Read More

  • Analysis Of My Life Has Stood A Loaded Gun By Emily Dickinson

    1454 Words  | 3 Pages

    The poetic work penned by Emily Dickinson is often viewed cryptically mainly due to the aspects of less punctuation and presence of destructive language that aligns imagery. For the purpose of analysis, the poem selected is Dickinson’s 754, ‘My Life has Stood – A Loaded Gun’ which was published in 1999. The poem has eluded critics and the interpretation of this work was carried out in a number of ways including frontier romanticism and a spirituality expression. On the other hand, the poem is underpinned with an extensive metaphor, in the light of which the life of the speaker becomes a loaded gun. The beginning of the poem depicts a typical American scene with the existence of a gun, a hunter, and a trip to the woods for hunting. The poem

    Read More

  • Started Early - Took My Dog, by Emily Dickinson

    914 Words  | 2 Pages

    The waxing and waning action of the text might symbolize the constant cycles of life. The fact that the text recedes then elongates in rhythm make the reader think the speaker of the poem is not sure what steps to take in their life. The speaker might not have convinced him or herself about the suicide attempt. Many suicidal thoughts are stopped short of action and then thought about later. Dickinson writes in this style to show the opposing forces of every situation. Suicide would likely be the most contemplated decision the narrator has ever had to make.

    Read More

  • Emily Dickinson's Before I Got My Eye Put Out

    945 Words  | 2 Pages

    Though Dickinson’s poem may initially seem transcendental, it can also be interpreted as a mixture of Emerson’s transcendental ideas and those that support the notion of imagination. Dickinson’s poem serves as a response to Emerson’s ideas because she adds on to his thoughts and unites his idea that there is oneness present in the world with the notion that imagination and sight serve as a bridge that connects human consciousness with nature to create this oneness that Emerson believes in. In the first stanza, the narrator says, that “I got my eye put out” (1), showing that she can now only see from one eye because of the singular use of eyes. Because she only talks of having lost sight in one eye, it can be assumed that she laments the limited vision that is now provided by her remaining eye. The narrator’s fragmented and limited vision caused by the loss of one eye is captured through the extensive use of dashes, which are used to separate the sentences, making them give a feeling of disarray and disjointedness.

    Read More

  • I Heard A Fly Buzz-When I Died By Emily Dickinson

    406 Words  | 1 Pages

    Similar to Shakespeare, Dickinson choses to put into use the iambic pentameter. The use of the meter enhances the poem, enabling the reader to go through the text with an easy rhythm in which one can digest the passage. “I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died” is a very complex poem, that may be difficult to analyze, but by breaking the poem apart piece by piece, using the iambic pentameter, analyzation becomes much easier. “I heard /a Fly /buzz - when /I died -/” (1) the pentameter stresses heard, fly, when, and died. Using those clues it is noted that the speaker is perhaps no longer living, based on the fact that he or she said “when” and “died”, which is past tense.the next three lines “The Still/ness in/ the Room/, Was like/ the Still/ness in/ the Air -/, Between /the Heaves/ of

    Read More

  • Hope is the Thing with Feathers by Emily Dickinson

    1018 Words  | 3 Pages

    Vendler, Helen. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010. 118-20. Google Books. Google. Web. 5 April. 2014. .

    Read More

  • Comparing The Self In Walt Whitman's Song Of Myself

    731 Words  | 2 Pages

    One very important topic that major American authors Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson incorporated into their writing was the idea of the “self” or “self-identity”. Both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were prolific major American poets and many of the topics they chose to write about involved aspects of transcendentalism. Though Whitman and Dickinson wrote about some of the same topics, they did not share the same meanings, especially with the description of “self”. Published in 1855 within a poetry collection called Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself” gives a look into how Walt Whitman felt about self-identity. Whitman uses a first person narrator to describe the “self” as the celebration of the individual through personal exploration and gaining personal experience. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I heard a Fly buzz when I died” published in 1896 as part of Poems by Emily Dickinson (third series), she alludes that the key to identifying the “self” is sight.

    Read More

  • My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun

    685 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun-” written by Emily Dickinson is an extended metaphor in which the speaker perceives her life as a loaded gun. The poem is written in the first-person point of view, where the speaker’s voice is also the voice of the gun. The poem is structured from the past, present, and future of the speaker (Estes).

    Read More

More about My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun Figurative Language

Open Document