An Explication of Emily Dickinsons Loaded Gun Essay -- Dickinson Load

An Explication of Emily Dickinsons Loaded Gun Emily Dickinsons poem My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun- is a muscular statement of the speakers choice to forego the accepted roles of her time and embrace a taboo existence, a life open only to men. The speaker does so wholeheartedly and without reservation, with any and all necessary force, exulting in her decision. She speaks with great power and passion, tolerating no interference, and wills herself to maintain this choice for her entire life. The structure of the poem is a cat valium one for Dickinson, alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter. These six quatrains are evocative of the verses from the Protestant religious services that Dickinson attended as a child but from which she chose to intermit as an adult. This meter gives the poem power and dignity, evoking the solemnity and unquestioned truth of a religious hymn. The mix of masculine and feminine images, their juxtaposition, and their occasional transformation crossways the gender line mirrors and mimics the message of the poem. The opening stanza begins with a series of masculine images a Loaded gun (1), The Owner (3-later identified as He-17, 21). The 4th line gives an image of the speaker being carried away, something usually perpetrated on a female by (usually) a male. This too is an ambiguous image is she carried away by her own love- enraptured-or is she carried away against her will, to be defiled, and used against her will? The second stanza resolves this question. Suddenly the speaker is We, roaming in Sovreign our woods (5), indicating an acceptance of the relationship. As an admirer of George Eliot, a charwoman who adopted a masculine identity in order to faci... ...ability to destroy, she is Without-the power to die- (24). Again we see the passivity of the Loaded gun- (1), unable to act without some enliven masculine force. Does she misbegot she has the power to destroy the poet within, but cannot then escape from the role of reclusive outsider she has sacrificed so much to attain? Or does she mean she can destroy anyone who wishes to take this Master from her, but cannot kill him herself, or end her own life-options she may have wished existed for her, considering the difficulties produced by her inability to fit in to society? Although there is an irreconcilable ambiguity to this last stanza, the uncertainty somehow does not detract from the power of the work, but rather adds to it. With Loaded Gun Dickinson proclaims herself a warrior, ready to kill or die in defense of her self-definition, that of Poet.