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

An Explication of Emily Dickinsons mean Gun Emily Dickinsons poem My biography had stood-a Loaded Gun- is a roleful statement of the speakers prize to forego the accept roles of her time and embrace a taboo existence, a life expand only to men. The speaker does so wholeheartedly and without reservation, with any and all inevitable force, exulting in her decision. She speaks with great power and passion, tolerating no interference, and pull up stakess herself to maintain this choice for her entire life. The structure of the poem is a common one for Dickinson, alter iambic tetrameter and trimeter. These six quatrains are evocative of the verses from the Protestant religious service that Dickinson attended as a child but 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 mix of manly and feminine videos, their juxtaposition, and their occasional transforma tion crosswise 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 avouch love- enraptured-or is she carried away against her will, to be defiled, and used against her will? The second stanza resolves this question. Suddenly 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 individuation in order 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 act without some animating masculine force. Does she mean she has the power to destroy the poet within, but can non the n escape from the role of reclusive noncitizen she has sacrificed so much to attain? Or does she mean she can destroy anyone who wishes to take this Master from her, but cannot kill him herself, or end her own life-options she may have wished existed for her, considering the difficulties produced by her inability to fit in to smart set? Although there is an irreconcilable 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.