Today’s Poem: My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun

Emily Dickinson: the poet’s private, deadly intensity

Henry B. Scammel, Rifle Shooting at Long Range, 1897 (Wikimedia Commons)

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My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun

by Emily Dickinson

My life had stood a loaded gun
In corner, till a day
The owner passed — identified,
And carried me away.

And now we roam the sov’reign woods,
And now we hunt the doe —
And every time I speak for him
The mountains straight reply.

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the valley glow —
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through.

And when at night, our good day done,
I guard my master’s head,
’Tis better than the eider duck’s
Deep pillow to have shared.

To foe of his I’m deadly foe,
Non stir the second time
On whom I lay a yellow eye
Or an emphatic thumb.

Though I than he may longer live,
He longer must than I,
For I have but the art to kill —
Without the power to die.
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As always, we read the poems of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) through the veils cast over them by her various editors. The versions of these poems that have entered the public domain bear the fingerprints not only of Dickinson herself, but of subsequent editors of her work: Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd in the 1890s, Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi, with Alfred Leete Hampson, in the early 20th century.

These early presenters of the poet’s oeuvre corrected what they clearly perceived as “errors” of spelling, punctuation, and word choice. As nearly as possible, later editors have sought to render the poems as they appear in Dickinson’s manuscripts, letting apparent errors stand as deliberate decisions on the part of the artist. Here, for comparison’s sake, is a restored version of Today’s Poem, “My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun,” in which we might note the insertion of em-dashes to interrupt the flow of syntax, and the word “power,” instead of art, in the penultimate line, so that the last line’s “power” becomes an echoing parallelism.

This poem, dating approximately from 1863 — early in the period of Dickinson’s correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson and other literary figures, and of her growing apprehension of her powers as a poet — does not number among the poems she sent with, or as, letters to friends. This is noteworthy simply because so many of her poems do appear among her letters. A single poem often constitutes the whole text of a letter, especially to her sister-in-law and friend, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, to whom Emily Dickinson — never guarded in her expressiveness to the people she cared for — habitually revealed herself with particular candor.

Yet Today’s Poem, in its intensity, seems to have belonged to the category of poems kept entirely private. It follows closely on Dickinson’s strange series of unsent “Master” letters, written between 1858 and 1862; the mention of the titular gun’s “owner” in the poem recalls that mysterious “Master.” In his hands, the gun “speaks for him.” At night, the gun “guards my master’s head” while he sleeps. She is his servant, his protector, his companion — and his voice. She shares his life, yet depends on his will to make use of her, or to release her from that use.

Emily Dickinson, c. 1848 (Wikimedia Commons)

And she is deadly. Dickinson’s posthumous editors of the 1920s have softened the explosive potential of the gun image, rendering the poet’s intended “power” in the penultimate line to the more elegant and evocative “art.” Only metaphorical guns here, this change seems to declare. We’re just talking about poetry, not actual life and death. Everybody relax.

But for Dickinson poetry, the whole potency of her imagination, was a matter of life and death. We can read the heat of her engagement, as an artist, in that striking third stanza, in which her very smile gives off the “glow” of a volcanic eruption. Beauty and destruction are bound up with each other — with a caveat. Her power is enormous. Yet she has no power over her own fate. The gun, deadly as it is, remains the servant of something more powerful than itself.

All this energy, creative and destructive at once, is constrained — as the gun is constrained by the owner’s will — within the poem’s formal bounds. Dickinson employs her characteristic common- or hymn-measure, tetrameter lines alternating with trimeter. Although her rhyme scheme is the abcb of the ballad stanza, I don’t think we would mistake a Dickinson poem for that traditional English folk narrative form. Her poems, including this one, read as the hymnody for a faith of her own devising. The regularity of the metrical pattern holds the intensity in abeyance, while the slant rhymes of stanzas 2, 3, 4, and 5 hint at the way the poem’s mind resists the formal constraints, even as it submits to them.

Again, this poem reads as a private confession of a potentiality both exhilarating and terrifying, wielded at the pleasure of a power outside herself. As the 1929 editorial intervention suggests, this power is the power of her art. But her own plosive reiteration of that word, power, at the poem’s close, is like the culminating discharge — pow pow — of the loaded gun.

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