My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun

The first stanza of ‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun -’ presents the poem’s speaker as currently powerless yet potentially powerful. In a wildly inventive, dislocating metaphor Dickinson compares herself to a “Gun”. The capitalisation of this violent object seems to add to the sense of power that it connotes, and yet this gun spends its life “stood”, seemingly passively, in “corners”.

Dickinson – presuming that the speaker is synonymous with the poet herself – remains in this shadowy, passive state until she is “identified” by a male “Owner” and “carried … away”. The fact that she is static without her “Owner” makes her appear powerless, the frequent dashes in this stanza seemingly echoing her feeling of stagnation, and yet it must be acknowledged that the “Gun” which she compares herself to is “Loaded”: although she is powerless without her owner, she has huge potential for power in the future.

Whilst alone, then, she is weak – but when united with her “Owner”, as a “We” in the second stanza, she is free – roaming in “Sovereign Woods” – and sufficiently powerful to “hunt the Doe”. The gender of this animal seems significant. That the pair hunt a symbol of femininity appears to suggest that Dickinson’s movement from the passive sphere of a shadowy “corner” to the more active sphere of the “Woods” involves the destruction of some (of her?) feminine identity. In this poem, then, power is gendered. Superficially, it is a masculine trait, and yet this is complicated by the fact that the poem’s next six lines all celebrate the complex power of Dickinson’s female voice. Though she needs the power of a man to identify her, carry her away, liberate her and let her speak, he needs the power of the female voice to “speak for him”, and when it does, the results are phenomenal.

“Mountains” reply, the gun “smiles” – a metaphor for its explosive flash – and “cordial light” glows upon the whole valley. These seem hugely powerful images emphasising the pleasure and beauty of female speech, but also its simultaneous power and potential for violence. Furthermore, the fact that “mountains” reply not only communicates the loud echo of the gunshot, but also seems to suggest that powerful female speech is a wholly natural occurrence. For Dickinson, when a woman speaks it is as though a “Vesuvian” eruption takes place, and the destructive, powerful violence that this image connotes is described – almost sadistically – as a “pleasure”; and why shouldn’t it be when your “life” has been spent – powerlessly – in “corners” up to this point?

If the strength of the gun’s voice complicates the power relationship in this poem, it is certainly not simplified by Dickinson’s next image. The gun’s “Owner”, now described as a “Master”, sleeps whilst Dickinson takes on the role of his “guard”. Perhaps more importantly, she states that this role is “better” than sharing his “Deep Pillow”. Dickinson has abandoned the more passive, powerless, domesticated role of the female sexual object that shares the “Master’s” bed in favour of the seemingly more powerful role of his “guard”, boasting of her physical strength: to his enemies she can be “deadly” simply by looking at them.

None stir the second time
on whom I lay a Yellow eye

The gunshot is no longer a “smile”, it is now a bright but deadly glance, and interestingly, the gun itself has all of the agency. In stanza two the gun “speak[s]” for the “Owner”, but now the gun itself chooses to “lay a Yellow eye” or even an “emphatic thumb” on the owner’s foe whilst he himself sleeps. The woman has taken on power and independence, and yet it is all still in service of a male “Owner”.

Power, then, is something that the speaker of this poem has in abundance. Her voice and glance and touch can guard masters, kill foes, light valleys, shake mountains into speech; and yet all of this is only made possible by the liberating force of the masculine “Owner” she protects and defends, and ultimately she acknowledges the limits of her power in the poem’s riddling and complex final stanza.

The speaker lacks “the power to die”. In other words, she is – when all is told – an inanimate object. All of her strength and violence – after all, she has “the power to kill” – seem irrelevant given that the figure that empowers her, that makes this strength possible, is male, human and transient. He will not “live” forever, and thus Dickinson, whilst she will exist or “live” as a gun will return to the “corners” she started in, and thus not “live” in the active and powerful way that she came to enjoy in the hands of her transient Master.

Full Moon and Little Frieda - Analysis

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath -
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

Ted Hughes

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It is “evening” in a vague rural location: a “lane”, “hedges”, “a dog bark”, “a pail”, “the moon”. The evening is both “cool” and “small” – an interesting pair of adjectives. The simplicity of the vocabulary seems to echo the “little” of the title, and creates a childish, playful atmosphere. And yet despite the seeming insignificance of the evening it has “shrunk” further, focused in onto a specific moment – yet merely a “dog bark” and the “clank of a bucket”. Despite onomatopoeia and consonance working together here to make this description vivid, almost audible, they are hardly profound enough sounds to warrant the shrinking they acquire.

However, it is not the sounds themselves that imbue this moment with its importance, but rather their audience: Hughes describes “you listening” – presumably Frieda, his daughter. The hyphen and stanza break before this line combined with its sheer brevity in contrast to the first, merge to create both a sense of Hughes’ adoration of his daughter – developed further, perhaps, by the gentle second person pronoun ‘you’ – and an impression of the child’s quiet stillness and concentration. It is Frieda’s focus, almost fascination with the seemingly insignificant noises of the countryside that warrant this shrinking in to this moment in particular, on an evening which was previously ‘cool’, dispassionate, and ‘small’, unimportant.

What follows is a sequence of closely related images. Hughes notes a “spider’s web” and a “pail”. Superficially, these images work merely to develop setting and also appear contradictory: the natural fragility of the spider’s web opposing the heavy industrialism of the pail, however closer inspection reveals that they are closely linked: one is “tense”, the other “still”; both are associated in their turn with water – “dew” and the “brimming” fluid of the bucket; both wait for quiet – yet beautiful – miracles of nature: the “touch” or the first dew or the reflected “tremor” of a star in the “mirror” of the water’s surface.

Frequent personification, linked by subtly distant alliteration of ‘t’, work here to create a sense of a world that is coming alive, but currently waits in anticipation of that moment: the web is ‘tense’ for a ‘touch’, the water ‘tempt[s]’ a ‘tremor’. In this sense, these images not only develop setting and an atmosphere of expectation, but also character: they can be read as metaphors for Frieda herself.

Just as the web is fragile, Frieda is “little”. Just as the web waits for the dew’s touch, Frieda too waits for the appearance of the moon. Although at first a comparison between his daughter and a pail appears unromanticised, a comparison with Sylvia Plath’s oeuvre perhaps suggests otherwise. As Hughes’ wife reached the climax of the depression that would ultimately kill her, some of her only optimistic poetry concerned her children. In ‘Balloons’, she describes how one:

‘Sits

Back, fat jug

Contemplating a world clear as water’

And in ‘Child’ admits that:

‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing

I want to fill it with color and ducks …

Pool in which images

Should be grand and classical’

Plath saw her children as ‘jugs’, ‘pools’, vessels to be filled with knowledge of the ‘world’, ‘color’, ‘ducks’, ‘grand and classical’ images, all symbolised by the metaphor of water. Can we therefore read in Hughes’ comparison of his daughter to a ‘pail’ an allusion to his late wife’s poetry? Frieda is now the bucket Plath wished her to be, ‘brimming’ with the images and sounds of innocence and nature that Plath would have wished for her: ‘dog’, ‘spider’s web’, ‘star’, ‘cows’, ‘breath’, ‘hedges’, ‘moon’.

The shift from second to third stanza is a huge thematic shift too: from stillness to movement, innocence to experience, beauty to terror, life to death. The contrast between the relatively short lines of stanza two and the sudden length of

‘Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their

warm wreaths of breath’

works to create this sense of an increase in pace and a resuming of time. The line breaks of the previous stanza promoted stillness, pauses, contemplation, expectation. Suddenly, we have a continual flow of language, symbolising the continual flow of cows which are imagined in a suddenly threatening image as a “dark river of blood”. Indeed, that their breath is imagined as “wreaths” only contributes to this funereal image. What this slightly gruesome death imagery adds to the poem is a thematic contrast between innocence and experience, father and daughter. This is Hughes meditating on the cows, not Frieda, who - as her sudden and enthusiastic interruption of ‘Moon!’ indicates – remains engrossed by the evening sky. As an adult, Hughes’ perception of the world is different; he is unable to look in awe at the innocent beauty of stars and dew (and enjoy the sound of their words as his daughter does, exclaiming moon a further three times) without also imagining the slaughter of cattle and eventual spilling of their currently ‘balanc[ed]’ milk.

Beyond the relationship between these two natural objects and Frieda, is a wider relationship that Hughes establishes between earth and space. Although Hughes writes that the water in the pail can “tempt the first star to a tremor”, we know it is only the star’s reflection shaking, not the star itself. Similarly, as Frieda ‘points at [the moon] amazed’ that moon too appears to be ‘gazing amazed’ back at Frieda herself. The verb ‘gazing’ implies Frieda’s innocence and beauty - the moon personified in a simple simile as an ‘artist’ unable to take his eyes of his fabulous ‘work’.

In this sense the moon is also a projection of the poet himself, the fact that it is ‘full’ implying his fully grown adult ‘gaze’, now returned from the threatening ‘boulders’ of the ominous cows to the youthful innocence of ‘little Frieda’.

Going to him! Happy letter!

GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him—
Tell him the page I did n’t write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.
Tell him just how the fingers hurried,	5
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow;
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.
“Tell him it was n’t a practised writer,
You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled;	10
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
As if it held but the might of a child;
You almost pitied it, you, it worked so.
Tell him—No, you may quibble there,
For it would split his heart to know it,	15
And then you and I were silenter.
“Tell him night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended—
What could it hinder so, to say?	20
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow,—happy letter!
Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!

In ‘Going to Him!’ Dickinson speaks directly to a ‘letter’ that she has written, presumably to a lover that she cannot be with. Whilst the letter is ‘going to him’ she, seemingly, cannot. That the letter is personified as ‘happy’ signifies Dickinson’s love for this man: the implication is surely that seeing this unnamed man brings happiness – even to an inanimate object – whilst she is forlorn because she cannot be with him. That Dickinson chooses such a childlike adjective to open her poem and – rather than her characteristic dash – uses two exclamation marks, combines to give it an immediately playful and joyful tone.

Sudden extreme anaphoric repetition is used in the following three lines, combined with the return of the dash, as Dickinson stutters three times over the phrase ‘tell him’. These devices blend to introduce hesitancy to the lyric. The speaker is experiencing a struggle to communicate her true feelings, something that is borne out by the fact that there is a whole ‘page [she] didn’t write –’. Indeed, the dash after this phrase almost becomes symbolic of this communicative lacuna, representing as it does an absence of adequate language. Sadly, what this lyric categorically does not do is compensate for the ‘page’ missed out from the letter. Rather than filling this gap in the poem, Dickinson remains obscure, telling her letter that she only said the ‘syntax’ and left the ‘verb’ and ‘pronoun’ out.

It would surely be reductive to assign concrete values to these ambiguous terms. The verb could be ‘love’, the pronoun perhaps ‘I’, ‘you’, or indeed both, however we are only guessing. That Dickinson only ‘said the Syntax’ implies that her letter was somehow restricted, governed by rules: for whatever reason, she felt (and indeed still feels) unable to break free from this restriction. As she phrases it in ‘It was not Death’, her life – or in this case her letter – is ‘shaven’ and ‘fitted to a frame’. Indeed, the sibilant quality of ‘said the Syntax’ seems to simultaneous create a regretful tone – as though she wished she could have said more than decorum demanded, and a whispering quality –implying her feeling that she and her letter need to be secretive together. Perhaps what she truly wishes to say mustn’t be uttered aloud.

As the stanza continues we gain an insight into Dickinson’s emotional state as she was involved in the process of the letter’s composition. At times her ‘fingers hurried’, and at others they ‘waded – slow – slow –’. Dickinson shifts from the quick, clipped vowels of ‘fingers hurried’ to the elongated and repetitive vowels and ‘w’ sound of ‘waded – slow – slow –’ to control the movement of this section of her poem, increasing and decreasing the pace of reading as the speed of her letter writing hurried and slowed. Indeed, this is further emphasised by the sudden proliferation of dashes through the latter line. In this slower moment, so beautiful crafted for the reader, she imagines that her letter wished it had ‘eyes’ in its ‘pages’ so that it could see what ‘moved’ Dickinson to suddenly write at such a laborious pace. The effect of this is to undermine Dickinson’s assertion at the beginning of stanza two that the ‘sentence toiled’ simply because she is not a ‘Practised Writer’. Given Dickinson’s remarkable poetic output one cannot help but see this as a hollow excuse.

Rather, we might focus (once again) on what Dickinson doesn’t wish to say rather than what she does, if we are to guess at what it is she wishes to communicate and what ‘moves’ her:

Tell Him – no – you may quibble there –

For it would split His Heart to know it

Dickinson dramatises two different reactions to this unspoken piece of information, dismissed so emphatically by the isolated and (consequently) emphasised ‘no’: her letter would ‘quibble’ with the knowledge – a verb suggesting a minor or slight objection, whilst the letter’s male recipient would find ‘His Heart’ entirely ‘split’ by it: clearly a far more serious reaction to this unarticulated fact. Ostensibly ‘split’ seems an entirely negative verb: what Dickinson wishes to tell this man would seemingly break his heart in two, and yet comparison to Dickinson’s other work may suggest otherwise: “Split the Lark”, she writes, “and you’ll find the music / bulb after bulb in silver rolled”.

Perhaps it is too convenient – although it is tempting and useful – to suggest that the recipient of this letter may be Charles Wadsworth. Wadsworth was the only man Dickinson ever loved, and yet, as James Reeves notes, this was a ‘hopeless and consuming passion’: he was married; a vicar; and eventually moved thousands of miles away from Dickinson herself in order to pursue his career. Nevertheless, this would certainly explain some of the poem’s ambiguities: there is little doubt that Dickinson would need to send a letter to him rather than visit herself, and also that knowledge of her love for him may well ‘split’ his heart between loyalty to his wife and profession, and affection (she may hope) for Dickinson herself.

This biographical detail is also useful for explaining the poem’s final stanza, which deals with the eventual completion of the letter and the intensely private Dickinson’s final decision to ‘hid[e]’ rather than send it. That she laboured over – though at least partly enjoyed - the content of the letter is indicated by her statement that ‘night finished before we finished’, the repetition of ‘finished’ and anaphora of ‘and’ in lines two and three of this stanza creating that sense of a drawn out process, so much so that the letter – in a hyperbolic personification – ‘begged’ to be ‘ended’. That it is the letter that wishes to end and not Dickinson is significant in illustrating her own enjoyment in this process of communication. Even the ‘clock’ that reminds Dickinson of impending ‘day’ appears ‘old’ she has spent so long perfecting the letter’s content.

In a characteristically compressed line Dickinson then instructs the letter to ‘tell him how she sealed you, cautious!’: this is not, however, what Byron (2000) would call an ‘unrecoverable deletion’ – the reader can fairly simply reconstruct the idea that Dickinson sealed the letter ‘cautious[ly]’ or ‘[with] caution’. This is also supported by the fact that she decides to ‘hid[e]’ the letter, at least ‘until tomorrow’. There is clearly something in its content – presumably ‘the page she didn’t write’, the unnamed ‘verb’ and ‘pronoun’ that she doesn’t with ‘him’ to know – that Dickinson hopes to conceal, yet simultaneously hopes to communicate: note that it is merely ‘until tomorrow’ that the letter is hidden, not permanently. In many ways, this is a poem about implied meaning and the existence of subtext: even though Dickinson has left a ‘page’, ‘verb’ and ‘pronoun’ out of her letter she remains aware, wary even, that they may be deduced or inferred through the words that she did write in their stead.

Interestingly, Dickinson ends the poem imagining the letter gesturing ‘coquette’ and ‘shaking’ its ‘head’, refusing to communicate its content or subtext. This playful, flirtatious imagery contrasts with the apparent severity of the letter’s words which take considerable ‘work’ and time, consequently leaving the poem on the same fun loving note with which it started. It is as though Dickinson projects her own emotions onto the letter, just as she projects her own emotions onto the personified shadowy and breathless landscape in ‘A Certain Slant’. In the end, it appears that coquettish flirtation may be the preferable strategy to a heartfelt revelation of a ‘page’ or ‘verb’ or ‘pronoun’ so profound they are left entirely unnameable in both the letter itself and the lyric its composition and concealment appear to have inspired.