Emily Dickinson's My Life Had Stood:A Loaded Gun Essay

Emily Dickinson was an exceptional writer through the mid-late 1800’s. She never published any of her writings and it wasn’t until after her death that they were even discovered. The complexity of understanding her poems is made prevalent because of the fact that she, the author, cannot expound on what her writing meant. This causes others to have to speculate and decide for themselves the meaning of any of her poems. There are several ways that people can interpret Emily Dickinson’s poems; readers often give their opinion on which of her poems present human understanding as something boundless and unlimited or something small and limited, and people always speculate Dickinson’s view of the individual self.

The late psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said: “The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.” This inspirational quote suggests that adversity provides people with new opportunities and can drive people to improve their life. Adversity comes in numerous forms, such as emotional, physical, and financial. Individuals have a choice to learn from adversity or allow it to break their character. However, certain types of adversity, such as severe chronic conditions or diseases, do little to improve character and the human condition. Thus, all types of adversity, pain, and suffering are not beneficial, however, most work to improve an

The last two lines of the poem are a timid reflection on what might happen “Had I the Art to stun myself/ With Bolts—of Melody!” (23-24). The idea that creation is a power that can get loose and injure even the creator illuminates why in this poem the artist positions herself firmly as a mere spectator. In these first two poems, we meet a Dickinson who is not entirely familiar to us—even though we are accustomed to her strong desire for privacy, these poems can be startling in the way they reveal the intensity of Dickinson’s fears. She is, after all, shrinking from what is dearest to her—nature, one of her favorite subjects, becomes a harsh judge, and poetry, her favored medium of communication, can suddenly render the reader “impotent” and the writer “stun[ned]” (19, 23). The extremity of her positions in shrinking from the small and beautiful things she loves creates the sense that this is just the beginning of a journey by leaving so much room for change.

what the author wants to imply past the surface level of the work. In Emily Dickinson’s poem

There is a lot more to poetry than just the words themselves. “What William Shakespeare called, “the mind’s eye” also plays a role” (Borus34). What that means is that your experiences and thoughts will add to your understanding. Dickinson had an active mind and a style so unique and unusual with her writing. Something that was very unusual about her writing was that she never put a title to her poems. Just like many poets, she used a wide assortment of literary devices such as, metaphor, simile, alliteration, and symbolism. “Unlike many writers of her time, Dickinson did not use conventional rhyme, capitalization, or punctuation” (Borus36). For example, she would put dashes not just at the end of a line, but also

Let’s play a game. Close your eyes. Now, think of some of your favorite poems. Can you remember the poets who created them? Did you name off Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, and Robert Frost to name a few? I imagine that the majority of people didn’t remember Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson was a talented poet who used her previously devastating personal experiences to enhance her poems.

The dashes in this poem are used more for emphasizing the sadness and anger the narrator feels at her lost. Instead of a bold and defiant stance the breaks in this poem reflect how fragmented the words are of those who have lost. What the narrator has lost is unclear, but it is obvious that she is angry at God for what she has lost by the lines, “Twice have I stood a beggar/ Before the door of God!” (Dickinson 3-4). The exclamation point at the end of the line illustrates her anger.

Notice how Dickinson uses the repetition of the pronoun we. In the second line of the second stanza, the owner can be further compared to a hunter. However, for the “We” to be significant the owner needs the narrator, just as a hunter needs his gun, and as a husband needs his wife. In association, all of the pairs previously mentioned all become one, specifically the owner and the narrator that represent the “We” in the first two lines of the second stanza. In the next two lines, there is an implication of the gun being used, which means the narrator is no longer in a potential state. The narrator is being the action for her owner, “And every time I speak for Him -- / The Mountains straight reply --” (754). The third and fourth lines of the second stanza entail that anytime the narrator speaks on the owner’s behalf, which corresponds to a gun firing, the echo effect of the noise bellowing through the mountains is the reply. Also, by the narrator speaking on his behalf, she, in relation to a bride or wife, is protecting and keeping the owner’s outlook by acting as his representative.

“My Life has stood – a Loaded Gun,” a six-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson requires the reader to pay close attention to the clues left behind to decipher the hidden meaning. The poem can seem confusing to even the most careful reader, but after reading the poem, it can be assumed that the speaker is female. Dickinson deliberately uses random capitalization, a lack of punctuation, and excessive dashes to highlight the meaning behind her words. After a first read, it is easy for the reader to conclude that the poem is exclusively about the personification of a gun, but several metaphorical clues lead to a second meaning, a message that a woman and her words have great power.

In the poem 764 of The Norton Anthology which starts "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -" (line 1), Emily Dickinson takes on the role of a married woman of the nineteenth century whose husband owns and completely controls her. The woman, whose voice Dickinson wrote from, reflects on the importance of her husband 's life to hers and her dependency on him being there to direct her life. Dickinson never married and lived a secluded life in her family 's home, only ever leaving the house for one year before returning again. Though she did not marry, the traditional roles of women still restricted her to live in the home of her family and under the ruler ship of her father like the rest of the women in the house. Some of her close friends and

I still find the periodic capitalization confusing. I can't make sense of why some words are capitalized and others aren't or if there is even purpose behind all of it (although I'm sure there is). These same elements of the poem are the very ones that I didn't include in my analysis, as I set them aside after being unable to determine their meanings. My argument could be debated on the basis that maybe Dickinson is not presenting us readers with questions at the, but with a choice. Instead of drawing parallels to humanity and its inability to choose whether it stays on Time's stream, she might just be calling out humanity and its foibles, the questions being posed to encourage change and not to just state inevitability. (Though I doubt that

The poem “My Life had Stood- a Loaded Gun,” was written by Emily Dickinson who is known to be one of the greatest American poets of all time. Dickinson’s works touched on a variety of subjects such as nature, religion, law, the identity of self, death, immortality and love. (Dickinson Museum) The Emily Dickinson’s Museum Organization has said that Dickinson’s poem consists of “abstract ideas and material things that are used to explain each other, but the relation between them remains complex and unpredictable. This is true of “My Life had Stood- a Loaded Gun.”

Emily Dickinson is a poet known for her cryptic, confusing language. Words are often put together in an unusual way and create deciphering difficulties for the reader. But behind all the confusion is a hidden meaning that becomes clear, and one realizes that all the odd word choices were chosen for a specific reason. The poem I will try to analyze is My Life Had Stood—A Loaded Gun, or number 754. I find this to be one of her most difficult poems to decode. However, I find the images fascinating and the last stanza very confusing but intriguing. What I first thought the poem was about and what I finally came to a conclusion on are two completely different thoughts. Through answering questions on the poem’s literary elements, thorough

Bogan posed the question, “Is this an allegory, and if so of what? Is it a cry from some psychic deep where good and evil are not to be separated?” Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood- a Loaded Gun” is said to be her most discussed poem due to its inability to be confined to a single meaning. Dickinson is known for her manipulation of female stereotypes and her love for anthropomorphizing things/animals. This has led to countless different interpretations of the poem varying from rage, to love, to relationships, to war, to heterosexuality, and to poetry itself. Despite these ideas, “My Life had stood- a Loaded Gun” is an extended metaphor for the relationship between

Emily Dickinson was one of the many famous American poets whose work was published in the 19th century. Her writing style was seen as unconventional due to her use of “dashes and syntactical fragments”(81), which was later edited out by her original publishers. These fragmented statements and dashes were added to give emphasis to certain lines and subjects to get her point across. Even though Emily Dickinson was thought to be a recluse, she wrote descriptive, moving poems on death, religion, and love. Her poems continue to create gripping discussions among scholars on the meaning behind her poems.