An Explication of Emily Dickinsons Loaded Gun Essays

An Explication of Emily Dickinsons Loaded Gun Emily Dickinsons poem My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun- is a powerful statement of the speakers choice to forego the accepted roles of her time and embrace a taboo existence, a life open only to men. The speaker does so wholeheartedly and without reservation, with any and all necessary force, exulting in her decision. She speaks with great power and passion, tolerating no interference, and wills herself to maintain this choice for her entire life. The structure of the poem is a common one for Dickinson, alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter. These six quatrains are evocative of the verses from the Protestant religious services that Dickinson attended as a child but†¦show more content†¦Now the speaker resumes alternation between images suggestive of gender: masculine- hunt (6), Mountains (8), Vesuvian (11), Day (13),-and feminine- woods (5), the Doe (6), Valley (10), Night (13), the Eider-Ducks / Deep Pillow (15-16). There is a further mingling of gender images in the first stanza: the masculine gun as a passive (i.e., feminine) instrument, standing in a corner, awaiting the masculine empowerment. Likewise, the cordial light / Upon the Valley glow (9-10), constitutes a soft, feminine image, until the next line reveals the glow is from a volcanic eruption-an extremely masculine image. This mixture and blurring of sexual cues reflects the message of the poem, the speakers adoption of a role crossing gend er lines. While there is very little rhyming in this poem, one rhyme stands out: Doe (6), and foe (17). Again we see the pairing of masculine and feminine images. And both are faced with death from the speaker. They also rhyme with the cross-gendered use of glow (10) mentioned above. The effect is to accentuate the blending and confusion of gender roles built by the poem. In the fourth stanza the speaker continues to affirm herself as outside the normal bounds of gender roles, including that role most taken for granted of Victorian women, that of wife. She proclaims her role in guarding My Masters Head (14) to be better than the Eider-Ducks Deep Pillow-toShow MoreRelatedHow Fa Has the Use of English Language Enriched or Disrupted Life and Culture in Mauritius15928 Words   |  64 PagesREADINGS CLOSE READINGS Post your close reading posts here. Share this: †¢ Twitter †¢ Facebook †¢ Like this: Like Loading... [pic] 26 Comments on â€Å"CLOSE READINGS† 1. [pic]John Cooper says: July 13, 2011 at 3:36 pm Emily Dickenson’s poem â€Å"Because I could not stop for Death† details the events the narrator experiences after dying. In the poem, the narrator is driven around in a horse-drawn carriage to several places, including a schoolyard, a field of wheat, and a house