My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun by Emily Dickinson
Today, few would deny that Emily Dickinson is an important figure in American literature. The numerous ways to interpret her poetry draws more and more readers into her publications. It's as if everyone could interpret Dickinson's poems into his or her personal life; seeing the poems the way they want to see it. This is the effect "flexible" poems have on people.
In Dickinson's "My Life Had Stood—A Loaded Gun", I interpreted the poem literally, thinking the poem was really about a gun and the relationship with its owner. But as I read the poem more and more, I felt the power and rage engulfed into this piece. I also gathered that, like most of Dickinson's poetry, there is a common denominator of her personal life and views into each of her pieces pf poetry. And the poem may very well supposed to be about a gun, but I interpreted it in a way that factored her into it.
I also read a little about Emily Dickinson and her life as a poet. And when I read about certain parts of her life and feelings, the poem seemed to "click" with her personal feelings about her life with poetry, like there was a sort of connection. She felt forced to practice her art privately, that is, she wrote her poetry privately and shared it with only a few family members and friends. To be able to dedicate herself to poetry, she withdrew into seclusion. It was a heavy price to pay to be a poet. This poem, with its "Vesuvian" voice, expresses her rage at the restrictions on the woman poet, her sense of the power of language, and the sense of control that writing poetry gave her.
This poem seems very powerful and full of rage. The speaker compares her life to an unused loaded gun...
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...sense that she is strong with her words and intelligence and can harm someone intellectually.
The speaker's purpose, power, and control are destructive and bring her the joy and satisfaction. But she also fears the thought of living without her "master", and she wants him to outlive her, "Though I than He—may longer live/ He longer must—than I". And maybe when she says "For I have but the power to kill/Without—the power to die", I think she's implying the phrase "words can kill", applying to the lines previous, like her being the deadly foe. And she will live forever through her poetry, so she cannot die in a sense that she will be forgotten. Her written thoughts, words, feelings, and emotions as a poet will live forever in the minds of her audience. She does not have the power to die as long as her written work is out in the minds of others.
For the most part of the poem she states how she believes that it is Gods calling, [Then ta’en away unto eternity] but in other parts of the poem she eludes to the fact that she feels more like her granddaughter was stolen from her [or sigh thy days so soon were terminate]. One of the main beliefs in these times was that when someone died it was their time; God needed them and had a better plan. Both poets found peace in the idea that God had the children now and it was part of the plan, but are also deeply saddened and used poetry as a coping mechanism.
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
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.
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.
Dickinson's poetry is both thought provoking and shocking. This poem communicates many things about Dickinson, such as her cynical outlook on God, and her obsession with death. It is puzzling to me why a young lady such as Emily Dickinson would be so melancholy, since she seemed to have such a good life. Perhaps she just revealed in her poetry that dark side that most people try to keep hidden.
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
Emily Dickinson had an interesting life, and is a profound woman in the history of America and literature. Emily wrote many poems. Some are titled, and many are given chronological numbers instead of headlining the main theme. I am interpreting Poem #315.
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
In Dickinson’s “MyLife Had Stood—A Loaded Gun”, was viewed literally, thinking the poem was regarding a gun and its owner. After reading the poem over and over again the reader picks up on the emotions the writer portrays. Dickinson’s poetry carries deep emotion with her personal life and views. She uses the gun to speak out everything masculine: “Loaded Gun” (1) cruel not pleasant, “hunt the Doe” (6) kills not...
Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest woman poets. She left us with numerous works that show us her secluded world. Like other major artists of nineteenth-century American introspection such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, Dickinson makes poetic use of her vacillations between doubt and faith. The style of her first efforts was fairly conventional, but after years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the meter of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language.
Vendler, Helen. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010. 118-20. Google Books. Google. Web. 5 April. 2014. .
...kinson likens herself to a loaded gun. She contains much energy and power, but can only be useful when taken into the hands of a master gunman. The punctuation and capitalization define “a Loaded Gun” as the theme of the poem. They also increase the strength of the metaphor. Dickinson’s capitalization and punctuation not only define her style, but they also provide added symbolic meaning and musical interpretation to her poetry.
Emily Dickinson, who achieved more fame after her death, is said to be one of the greatest American poets of all time. Dickinson communicated through letters and notes and according to Amy Paulson Herstek, author of “Emily Dickinson: Solitary and Celebrated Poet,” “Writing was the way she kept in touch with the world” (15). Dickinson’s style is unique and although unconventional, it led to extraordinary works of literature. Dickinson lived her life in solitude, but in her solitude she was free to read, write and think which led to her nonconformity and strong sense of individualism. Suzanne Juhasz, a biographer of Dickinson, sums up most critics’ idea of Dickinson ideally: “Emily Dickinson is at once the most intimate of poets, and the most guarded. The most self-sufficient, and the neediest. The proudest, and the most vulnerable. These contradictions, which we as her readers encounter repeatedly in her poems, are understandable, not paradoxical, for they result from the tension between the life to which she was born and the one to which she aspired” (1). Dickinson poured her heart and soul into over 1,700
The final two lines of the first quatrain point to the tranquility of her death, and the narrator’s consolation that she is beyond the grasp of human mortality. In the second quatrain, the impact of her death is starting to dawn on the speaker. In the first line, by saying that she has “No motion.no force” (line 5) he is possibly reflecting on how she was in life: a woman in constant movement, one that took part in life, rather than sitting on the sidelines. Now, all of that energy has ceased to exist. The speaker, however, tries to look at the situation on the positive side.
Many of her poems were a reaction to the rejection of many publishers and other literary critics. This particular poem’s character comes from Dickinson’s reaction to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement that “poets are thus liberating gods.” Here she is challenging the established literati by questioning popular Emersonian views. In particular, this poem is a reaction to Emerson’s belief that “the poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.” Basically, it is a reaction to the idea that the poet is the creator of beautiful words, liberating the common people by giving them words they would not have access to.