My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun

Guns are vital in today’s society, dividing the country, especially families with debates over the use of guns. Sarah Vowell is a citizen who disagrees with the use of guns, talking about her experience with a gun and her family in her essay “Shooting Dad”. Using many rhetorical techniques in her essay, she sends a message within her story, telling the audience reading her story that guns are not worth it. Vowell’s use of many different techniques helps the story come to life, explaining her life with guns around and how someone gets weak when someone has a gun around.

In the article “A peaceful Woman Explains Why She Carriers a Gun,” the author Linda M. Hasselstrom has a credible argument for carrying a gun. Hasselstrom has a solid ethical appeal and her argument had logic based on her many dangerous personal experiences. Although her article is credible, she uses many fallacies to make it seem that if women have a gun they can protect themselves from men.

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.

There had always been an overabundance of guns in Sarah’s household, causing constant obstacles for her. She said herself that “Guns were everywhere”(Shooting Dad) and went on to explain that “[Guns were] leaning into corners, an entire rack right next to the TV”(Shooting Dad). Because her father was a Republican and favored the second amendment, he felt that it was his right and privilege to have as many guns around as he liked and push his opinion onto others, including his own daughter.

Emily Dickinson, recognized as one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, was born December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts (Benfey, 1). Dickinson’s greatness and accomplishments were not always recognized. In her time, women were not recognized as serious writers and her talents were often ignored. Only seven of her 1800 poems were ever published. Dickinson’s life was relatively simple, but behind the scenes she worked as a creative and talented poet. Her work was influenced by poets of the seventeenth century in England, and by her puritan upbringing. Dickinson was an obsessively private writer. Dickinson withdrew herself from the social contract around the age of thirty and devoted herself, in secret, to writing.

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.

Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul Selects her Own Society” presents herself as absolute and her rights as unchallengeable. The poem puts forward the idea of “friendship or love” which means choosing a significant person and excluding other people. Dickinson reveals that she was shutting people from her life, but because it had been so long, they are no longer interested in taking part of her life. Dickinson’s actions imply that the ability to create and construct a world for oneself, such as choosing your own actions, provides an example of a god-like achievement. Overall, Dickson asserts the importance of “the Self” theme which is shown my just speaking and writing as a ratification of the will to explore and express “the Self” to others.

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

In the poem, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun,” published around 1863, Emily Dickinson effectively uses metaphorical language in making the speaker compare him/her self to a loaded gun. The speaker speaks as if he/she is a loaded gun waiting to expose their full potential. When reading this poem, one could definitely see religious connotations in that one cannot reach his/her full potential without The Master’s – God’s – help and direction.

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

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,

Emily Dickinson knows like most people that parents go through a time in which their children must leave them to go live on their own and to experience life for themselves. This is always a time of pain and sadness for a parent, but many parents understand the need for the child to move on. Though she never had kids, this theme seems evident in Dickinson’s poem “It did not surprise me.” Emily Dickinson often wrote about the loss of someone she cherished in life and would surely understand a parent’s grief in this situation. In this poem, Dickinson is willing to accept the loss of a minor love once in her life, but she is not willing to accept the loss of a stronger love for someone else revealing that she will seek to keep those that she loves even if it means restricting her loved one.

Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life was arguably a result of her proposed bi-polar disorder. This life and disorder unduly influenced the themes of her poetry. She chose not to associate herself with society and volumes of her poems, published posthumously, examine this idea as well as the themes of nature and death. The clearest examples of these themes are presented in the following analysis of just of few of her

Emily Dickinson a modern romantic writer, whose poems considered imaginative and natural, but also dark as she uses death as the main theme many times in her writings. She made the death look natural and painless since she wanted the reader to look for what after death and not be stuck in that single moment. In her poems imagination play a big role as it sets the ground for everything to unfold in a magical way. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. She turned increasingly to this style that came to define her writing. The poems are rich in aphorism and dense

At first Glance, “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” by Emily Dickinson is puzzling, even meaningless. However, upon further analysis it is clear that the poet has made several deliberate choices to assist the reader in discerning the poems meaning. Her deployment of poetic devices correlates to the narrative she is writing, allowing the reader to deeply perceive the poems message. Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” provides commentary on an individual’s ability to decide who can enter the most intimate parts of her life, which the reader can empathize with through figurative language, repetitive sounds, and enjambment.