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

An Explication of Emily Dickinsons sozzled Gun Emily Dickinsons meter My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun- is a violenceful statement of the loudspeaker systems choice to forego the accepted roles of her time and savvy 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 body structure of the poem is a common one for Dickinson, alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter. These sixsome quatrains are evocative of the verses from the Protestant religious services that Dickinson attended as a child solely from which she chose to abstain as an adult. This meter gives the poem power and dignity, evoking the solemnity and unquestioned truth of a religious hymn. The jumble of mascu pipe literary argument and feminine images, their juxt aposition, and their occasional transformation across 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 fourth 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. all of a sudden the speaker is We, roaming in Sovreign our woods (5), indicating an acceptance of the relationship. As an admirer of George Eliot, a woman who adopted a masculine identity in bless 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 pretend without some animating masculine force. Does she mean she has the power to destroy the poet within, but cannot then escape from the role of reclusive outsider she has sacrificed so much(prenominal) to attain? Or does she mean she can destroy anyone who wishes to take this inhibit from her, but cannot charge him herself, or end her own life-options she may strike wished existed for her, considering the difficulties produced by her inability to fit in to society? Although there is an conflicting 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.