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.