Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

Emily Dickinson was a poet who never published her poems. Yet, her poetry recovered postmortem invokes heavy themes that relate to audiences today. One of these poems is “My Life Had Stood– a Loaded Gun,” a six-stanza four-quatrain poem describing a life being wielded like a gun by a male Master.

The gun is a profound image and symbol that permeates the poem. It’s a weapon associated with dominance, power, and death— an object that opposes whatever its Master points it at. The poem references the life being used to hunt a “Doe” (Line 6)– a female deer. The dashes strung throughout the lines create a sense of rhythmic pause, like the sound of a bullet being fired out of the gun. The repetition of words and phrases, like in lines 4–7, gives the poem some snappiness when read aloud as if the lines are prepped on the trigger.

To me, this feels like a metaphor for the stripping of one’s autonomy through the objectification of the speaker. This life, whoever’s life it is, is used to take another’s life. Its Master has possession and power over the life, able to wield it however he desires. The speaker does not have a free will. Instead, it is revolving itself around its Master, which makes the poem just as thought-provoking as it is terrifying.

I believe the speaker is Emily Dickinson herself, as she didn’t intend for her poems to be published. However, it could also be of the general female population since she lived during a male-dominated era. The audience is left ambiguous by the poet, bringing more intrigue to the poem and its message. I wonder why she decided to keep her poems a secret, considering the existence of famous female poets. Could there be more to her poems than meets the eye?

I cannot arrive to a conclusive interpretation of this poem, but I found it interesting nonetheless. I think the gun in this poem represents blind faith, because of how the gun is personified. The gun waits for its master, roams with its master, speaks for its master, and on being fired, smiles with “such cordial light.” The gun takes pride in serving its master, noting the fact that the foes of its master, will never “stir the second time,” implying that the gun never fails its duty. 

I can’t say for sure what Dickinson is trying to convey through the faithful personification of the gun. I’ll bullet some thoughts though.

• The Master is definitely male, so maybe the message involves female obedience, assuming the gun’s dialogue is representative of Dickinson herself.
• Or perhaps it is the opposite, the gun has the power to kill and will outlive its owner.

In “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” I was very curious about why the bird “bit an Angle Worm in halves \ And ate the fellow, raw” (4), but “then hopped sidewise to the Wall \ To let a Beetle pass” (8). I wondered why the bird didn’t also eat the beetle. These two instances are juxtaposed and I think it brings up the idea of nature being unpredictable and not clearly understood by humans. I also interpreted this as reflecting a conscience in the bird, where the bird doesn’t just kill and eat without purpose. The contrast between the image of biting a worm in half and eating it raw, and the image of a bird hopping sideways in order to avoid stepping on a beetle is a little funny. For me, this also makes me think of the curiosity of the speaker, and brings me a little smile to think about how interesting and almost silly this picture would have seemed. 

In line 13, the speaker says “Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb.” The end-stopped punctuation of the preceding line makes this statement seem like the speaker is the one who is in danger and being cautious. But I think that there is some ambiguity here, because the bird would also presumably find itself in danger when faced with this human. This ambiguity is furthered by the description of the bird as having eyes that “looked like frightened Beads” in the preceding paragraph (11). I think this ambiguity is important, because it puts the speaker and the bird on equal terms, both as observers. The part where the bird “unrolled his feathers, \ And rowed him softer Home” (15-16) is also interesting, because at first, I imagined the bird unrolling his feathers like he was opening his hand to take the crumb, but the bird actually flies away. This seems to emphasize the seamlessness and grace of nature, as described in the last stanza, where the ocean is described as “Too silver for a seam” and butterflies “Leap, plashless as they swim.” The bird seamlessly acts in unpredictable ways and that is a remarkable thing to be capable of. 

“Split the Lark” seems to have a similar message about the seamless and unpredictable grace of nature. In that poem, Dickinson focuses on a “look but don’t touch” aspect of the beauty of nature. I think that’s connected to her message in “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” where she’s telling us that in fact, you can’t break up the grace of nature. I also drew comparisons between the message of this poem and physics. There is a weird quantum physics experiments called the double slit experiment where electrons behave in different ways when they were observed/measured, vs when they are unobserved. The electrons’ beauty and mysterious behavior is altered by any sort of attempt to observe them, and I think that this phenomenon reflects the message of “Split the Lark” beautifully. I’m not going to try to explain these experiments, because I would do a bad job, but here is a link to a video about the double slit experiments: https://youtu.be/A9tKncAdlHQ?si=WLbory2-Wz1MlmdR