Emily Dickinson "My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun"

In Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun,” she uses the metaphor of a gun to explain her relationship with an unnamed “Master” character. In true Dickinson fashion, the poem is left vague and ambiguous leaving the reader the job to interpret whether the master represents a lover, God, or her relationship to her poetry. Dickinson uses the images of volcanoes, a gun, and other figurative language to give the reader a clearer sense of her explosive rage describing her internal conflict between being a conventional 19th Century woman and trying to be a writer in the 19th century. There is an internal battle between the pleasure that she gets from the power of writing poetry and the danger that comes when unleashing her most inner thoughts. Dickinson uses the metaphor of the gun and the master in “My Life had stood a Loaded Gun” to express her feelings regarding the tension between being a poet and being a “conventional” 19th century woman which leads her to come to a place of self-acceptance by the end of the poem.

The first line of the first stanza of poem “764” compares the speaker of the poem’s life to that of a loaded gun. The loaded gun is an image that is used to describe the poetry written by the speaker. Dickinson has this gun because she is filled with this incredible ability to write poetry, however she has not chosen to fire it and shoot the gun for fear of the social stigma that comes along with being a woman poet in the 19th Century. Writing the poetry brings Dickinson to a place where she feels powerful, a place where she is able to unleash all of her emotions through words, just as a person holding a loaded gun would feel. The third and fourth line of the first stanza of the poem describes “The Owner” coming into Emily Dickinson’s life. “The Owner passed- identified-/And carried Me away” (Lines 3-4). The term “The Owner” is used to describe the poetry and the power that the poetry has over the speaker. Her love of poetry defines her and...