My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun— by Emily Dickinson

First published: 1929, in Further Poems

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” (the title is not Emily Dickinson’s, since she did not title her poems) is a short poem of twenty-four lines divided into six stanzas. The poem is written in the first person from the point of view of a speaker who compares her life to “a Loaded Gun.” In fact, the voice of the speaker and the voice of the gun are identical throughout the poem.

In the opening stanza of the poem, the speaker tells how her life—of which she speaks as if it were “a Loaded Gun”—had been full of potential power yet unused and inactive (“a Loaded Gun—/ In Corners”) until its “Owner” came by, “identified” it, and carried it away. The speaker (as gun) then contrasts, beginning in the second stanza, what her life is like now that she has been claimed and put into use by her “Owner.” Together, the speaker (gun) and her owner are free to wander anywhere they like (“We roam in Sovreign Woods”) and have the power and authority to pursue even the prized game of royal reserves (“And now We hunt the Doe”).

Halfway through the second stanza, however, the speaker begins to turn away from the power of the royal “We” and to focus instead on her own sense of emerging individual power: “And every time I speak for Him—/ The Mountains straight reply.” In these lines, the speaker usurps the owner’s right to speak for himself. Moreover, whereas in the past the speaker’s life has stood “In corners,” unnoticed, like a wallflower, the speaker gleefully reports that now as soon as she speaks, nature immediately takes notice of her (“The Mountains straight reply”). In other words, the gun is fired and the mountains immediately echo the sound.

The third through the fifth stanzas continue to develop—in the voice of the gun—the speaker’s growing realization and enjoyment of her own power. The third stanza compares the burst of light when the gun is fired to a “smile” from a volcano (“a Vesuvian face”) as it releases its pleasure, and the fourth stanza celebrates the “good Day” that is “shared” by gun and owner. By the fifth stanza, the speaker revels in her power as a “deadly foe,” and the speaker’s sense of her own volition and power reaches a climax. Her actions are now characterized as completely autonomous, and the poem focuses in detail on delineating the specifics of her power: No one survives “On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—/ Or an emphatic Thumb.”

A sharp break occurs, however, between the fifth and the final stanza. As if the speaker—at the height of her power—suddenly realizes that the “Owner” who brought her to life can disappear just as abruptly as he appeared, her ecstatic revel in power halts, and the speaker’s voice falters in a frantic attempt to devise some rationale that might enable her to retain her power. For “He longer must [live] than I,” she muses, because “I have but the power to kill” but not “the power to die.”

Forms and Devices

The most important poetic device in the poem is the metaphor, a figure of speech used to denote an idea (or an object) by suggesting an analogy or likeness between them. The metaphor of the speaker’s life as a gun, in fact, occurs in three stages, structuring the poem in terms of the speaker’s past, present, and future life. The speaker first reveals that in the past her life was like a passive “Loaded Gun.” She then—for the greater part of the poem (the central four stanzas)—moves into a narration of her life in the present by comparing her life to a gun that is actively engaged in firing. By the final stanza, the speaker contemplates the future of her life as if it were an empty gun, devoid of its bullet, its “emphatic Thumb.”

The metaphoric qualities of the poem become increasingly complex as the speaker develops additional metaphors to characterize the primary metaphor, the gun. The gun’s fire is spoken of as if it were a “smile,” a volcanic (“Vesuvian”) eruption, and a “Yellow Eye,” and the gun’s bullet becomes an “emphatic Thumb.” This layering of metaphor upon metaphor functions to underscore—within the language and experience of the poem itself—those qualities of repression and masking that are central to the poem’s theme regarding the expression of will and power.

This sense of repression and disguise with respect to power is further enhanced in the poem by the speaker’s tone or attitude toward the subject being described. The speaker’s simple, matter-of-fact narrative style together with her “cordial” choice of words—“roam,” “speak,” “smile,” “light,” “glow,” “pleasure,” “shared”—to depict the act of erupting, exploding, or killing build into the reader’s experience of the poem the work’s underlying explosive tensions. The reader is lulled, too, by the perfectly regular, hypnotic metrical rhythm of the language until at the final stanza the reader is jarred by the speaker’s desperate rationalization of her existence. This focus in the poem on creating an experience in which the reader participates is one of the qualities that define modern poetry and is a technique that Dickinson characteristically employed in her poems.

Dickinson’s effective manipulation of language to construct the poem can be seen in her exploitation of certain grammatical structures. The repetition in the first two lines of the second stanza—“And now,” “And now”—conveys the eager, excited, and expectant voice of a newly empowered being. Similarly, the juxtaposition at the end of the poem of repeated grammatical structures containing different words effectively embodies and reveals both the speaker’s sense of fragmentation and her desperate attempt to resolve her conflict. The juxtaposed clauses “He—may longer” and “He longer must” followed by the phrases “the power to kill” versus “the power to die” simultaneously contain and convey the speaker’s effort to scramble and rearrange the elements of language itself in order to maintain her will and her power.

Bibliography

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