My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun Analysis

With a close reading of Emily Dickinson’s poem 764, ‘My Life Had Stood – A Loaded Gun’ and poem 320, ‘There’s a certain Slant of Light’ I will be comparing and contrasting both poem in terms of the metre, language and themes that can be seen in both and others that are opposite to one another. The main aspects of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is the varying length of each poem, unusual capitalism throughout each, the variant of word choices and the slant or approximate rhyme. I choose poem 320 to compare to poem 764 because while it has similar aspects and themes it is in Dickinson’s ‘Death’ category rather than the ‘Poetic-Self’ category that poem 764 belongs too. ‘My Life Stood Still – A loaded Gun’ is written in common metre, which is popular

Dickinson also uses metaphors to give a deeper meaning to what it going on. “We” means the gun and the owner, this is clear when you read the next few lines “roam in sovereign woods” and “hunt the doe–.” (5-8) To explain when the gun is shot, Emily Dickinson uses the line “every time I speak for him” and to portray the guns echo against the mountain it is referred as “mountains straight reply.”(5-8) Emily Dickinson uses this language in this poem to make it more aesthetic. Readers do not at first read immediately pick up on the meaning behind Dickinson’s word and metaphor choices but once you delve deeper into the poem the meaning is obvious in spite of the figurative

However some clues advocate a struggle of male and female personalities. The pronouns used are make but we know that a female deer is called a “doe.” (6)

“The owner passed – identified and carried me away” (3-4) We find out that the owner is male only in line 7, therefore the female speaker has a male “owner” who has power over her. Based on what was expected of women at the time this poem was first written readers can read this and understand it as Dickinson’s oppression to how women were treated at that time.

This same issue of the speaker being a man or a woman is seen in ‘There’s a certain slant of light.’ We only assume the speaker is female because it is in the first person but because of the religious meaning to the poem we can further assume that it is in fact Emily Dickinson speaking.

While both poems share a connection with the theme of gender, they contrast with the themes of violence and