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My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun Essay

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“My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun” by Emily Dickinson is a short poem which uses an extended metaphor comparing the speaker’s life to a loaded gun. The author appears to be sharing her feelings regarding her own life and how she has not realized her full potential. She considers her life full of potential power . . . yet unused. This poem demonstrates that a person’s perspective is truly shaped by their life experiences - or lack of. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun," personification, metaphors, and symbolism reveal the author's perspective on the power of anger or violence in one’s life The first literary element that is used within Emily Dickinson’s poem to show her perspective is personification. Within …show more content…

Dickinson uses metaphors to convey to her readers how anger and violence can be difficult to handle in one’s life. The first example of a metaphor in the poem is also within the first line. In the poem, life is said to be an unused, loaded gun which means that it has potential or power that is ready and waiting to be used. “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –” (1). The gun is unused as if Dickinson is trying to hold in and handle her anger and frustration without confronting it. Another metaphor found within the poem is the line about the Vesuvian face. The author refers to her anger as a Vesuvian face which makes reference to a volcano in Italy. She is revealing that her anger is explosive when she say, “It is as a Vesuvian face” (11). Dickinson is trying to convey how hard it is to mask her anger to the world. The last example of a metaphor within the poem is regarding the doe. Dickinson indicates that she is going to hunt the doe. Hunting is a metaphor for killing a part of herself and dealing with her anger. “And now We hunt the Doe –” (6). The majority of Dickinson’s poem is portrayed by metaphors which are vital to her message that handling anger and violence can be difficult. “The most important poetic device in the poem is the metaphor”

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Throughout the poem, Dickinson describes Death as a male that keeps coming for her while she is trying to escape him. In the first two lines, she uses personification, giving Death human characteristics. “Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me,” emphasizing death as a male and how he has stopped for her at this point. In lines 9-12, Dickinson uses imagery to create a picture for the reader to emphasize what she and Death are witnessing as they are passing through the area. Imagery is used throughout the poem to illustrate what she is seeing such as children at recess and passing the Fields of Gazing Grain and watching the Sun Set as they take a walk.

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This is why she shows such a fascination towards it. “There is no frigate like a book”, this shows that she found literature as a great escape from life (Dickinson 1). Dickinson’s isolation to the world is further exemplified in, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” I believe that this poem shows that she believes that she is nobody, and finds no reason to become a “somebody” because it is useless to her (Dickinson).

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Whitman and Dickinson share the theme of death in their work, while Whitman decides to speak of death in a more realistic point of view, Dickinson speaks of the theme in a more conceptual one. In Whitman’s poems, he likes to have a more empathic view of individuals and their ways of living. For example, in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, the poet talks about not just of himself, but all human beings, and of how mankind works into the world and the life of it. Even though the poem mostly talks about life and the happiness of it, Whitman describes also that life itself has its ending, and that is the theme of death. For Dickinson, she is the complete opposite of happiness.

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The theme of this story to me is that everybody make mistakes, but it's what you learn from them is what matters. I felt like this was a really good theme because it corresponds with the main idea of the poem which is Nothing gold can stay. Figurative language was used threw out the poem in many different forms, but i felt like personifications was most effective because of the amount of it and meaning of the lines. Like in lines 1-4 they all have personification in them but in different ways. This poem can be applied in areas in my life when we are talking about sports because it helps me realize that mistakes are going to happen but if you learn it will help you prosper later.

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This poem illustrates traits of aspiration. At the beginning of the poem, Dickinson has a darker tone. She discloses that people adjust to the dark. Literally, our eyes adjust to different shades of light, but also figuratively. What she proposes in lines 7-8, where she says “Then - fit our Vision to the Dark / And meet the Road- erect” (7-8), means that the darkness equals the unknown and the road compares to our future.

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Dickinson’s use of repetition and onomatopoeia helps show just how mad the narrator really is. It is stated,” Kept beating-beating- till I thought my mind was going numb”. The narrator is hearing noises that aren’t really there like the “beating” of a drum which supports the idea she is crazy. The first person point of view helps show that apparent funeral that is taking place inside of her mind. She states,” I felt a funeral, in my Brain…

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This quote is showing how Dickinson also uses imagery in her poems. She puts the image of a self reflection shutting the door right in front of you. Another similarity between Whitman and Dickinson is that fact that both poets submitted some politically based poems. Dickinson and Whitman wrote about death in a lot of her poems, specifically the themes including recourse of the soul and the dark mysteries of death. For example in 479, “Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me” (Dickinson 1-2).

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Most of her lyric poetry touched on rather abstract concepts and ideas as a single speaker expresses inner thoughts and feelings. One of the elements of Dickinson’s writing that makes her stand out is her unique poetic structure. Her language is “elliptically compressed, disjunctive, at times ungrammatical; its reference is unclear; its metaphors are so densely compacted that literal components of meaning fade” (Miller 1). This style, as well as the use of dashes and capitalization throughout her writing, can make it difficult to understand the meaning behind her poems. For example, when Dickinson writes “The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air - Between the Heaves of Storm-”, she capitalizes common nouns in order to add emphasis, and she uses dashes for dramatic effect and emotion.

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The use of metaphor is evident in the poem in the first stanza the metaphor “Futile - the winds -” is important because it is showing that in the middle there is no windy path that can break from their love. And the wind is incapable to produce. This goes back to my thesis because Dickinson is expressing her emotion and love that nothing can come in between the love she has for her significant other and not even the winds can stop the longing of their love. The second stanza “To a Heart in port -”, gives the message that her heart is being unused right now, but is in the boat coming.

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Dickinson communicates why she dislikes being a “somebody” by using a simile. She writes that a “somebody…like a Frog” will feel pressured “to tell one’s name - the livelong June - to an admiring Bog” to maintain their status (Dickinson 847). This simile shows that the narrator dislikes the idea of having to retain public attention through their actions. Interpretation Throughout her poem, Dickinson tries

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The poem that stood out the most while reading this assortment of Emily Dickinson poems, was her poem numbered 656/520. This poem used imagery in numerous ways throughout in order to show the audience the important themes and the overall meaning of this work of literature. The poem’s main theme was about a walk on the beach that the poet encountered in the early morning. Although the poem is about a beach it can also give the audience contextual clues into other aspects of life.

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My life had stood – a Loaded Gun (Emily Dickinson) • Who is the loaded gun? The loaded gun is a woman(poet) torn between two dimensions how she perceives herself (Rich, p.1), trying to feel and do in the 19th century things that were thought to be exclusive to men, taking the risk of defining herself and her feminine ideal side, governed by patriarchy.

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Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are the most representative and brilliant poets of the nineteenth century and in the American literature in general. However, we can also say that, between them, they have the most different styles of writing they can have, just as well as their lives. For example, as Christenbury (n.d.) stated, firstly that Walt Whitman was someone “[…] who struggled to get his poems published and who developed a broad admiring audience during his lifetime. In contrast, the reclusive Emily Dickinson died unknown to the world of poetry, leaving a box full of unpublished poems”. Nevertheless, we can find some similarities in their lives, for example, both of them lived in a difficult historical period: on the one hand Emily Dickinson, who was born the 10th of December of 1830 and on the other hand, Walt Whitman, who was born the 31st of May of 1819, lived the period of the American civil war.

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In Dickinson’s poem, death is not as terrifying as it is believed to be by most people. She sees death as a beautiful thing, a new chapter, rather than the last chapter. In contrast, Donne personifies death as a bully who turns out not to be so tough. Death is often thought of as dark and frightening, but Dickinson describes death as a journey, and not just a single event that concludes a life.

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In “Because I Could Not Stop For Death”, Emily Dickinson uses imagery and symbols to establish the cycle of life and uses examples to establish the inevitability of death. This poem describes the speaker’s journey to the afterlife with death. Dickinson uses distinct images, such as a sunset, the horses’ heads, and the carriage ride to establish the cycle of life after death. Dickinson artfully uses symbols such as a child, a field of grain, and a sunset to establish the cycle of life and its different stages. Dickinson utilizes the example of the busyness of the speaker and the death of the sun to establish the inevitability of death.

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