Introducing Emily Dickinson, part II: A Loaded Gun [by David Lehman]

Emily Got Her Gun

Like many other readers, I have long been fascinated by Emily Dickinson's poem #764, which has instigated much commentary and many conflicting opinions:

My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --
In Corners -- till a Day 
The Owner passed -- identified --
And carried Me away --

And now We roam in Soverign 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 --
None 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 power to kill,
Without -- the power to die --

Why does the poet present herself as an instrument of volcanic (“Vesuvian”) power? Why does she adopt a masculine, even a phallic persona? How are we to understand the paradoxes of the final stanza, the first one a beautiful example of the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus, the second an elegant antithesis? To enter this terrain is to stray into heavily contested space.

Some feminists infer a suppressed, pent-up energy ready to explode. Was the poet, about whom we know so little, full of murderous fury? Adrienne Rich believed that the poem is “about possession by the daemon.” In A Loaded Gun, his 2010 novel centering on Dickinson, Jerome Charyn describes “a woman maddened with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will.” Camille Paglia will have none of it. “My Life had stood” is “one of Romanticism’s great transsexual self-transformations.” It is also, Paglia writes, a “Romantic vampire poem,” with the gun representing “Dickinson as denatured vampire, a masculine maker of sadistic poetic speech.” Paglia’s views, in her irrepressible prose, are a pleasure because they quicken thought, but her musings will not necessarily facilitate a close reading of the poem.

The identification of the poet with a rifle is the mystery that confronts any reader. In “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” Dickinson presents herself as “a boy.” Here Dickinson announces from the start that her life is “a Loaded Gun” and that it is as a gun that she is speaking. The unambiguous first line of the poem, even if isolated from the rest of the poem, may arouse endless speculation. It is the poem’s final mystery, never to be solved, though I rather like the theory that the gun stands for Emily’s power as a poet.

Some maintain that the poem is Dickinson’s depiction of marriage in which inevitably the husband must kill the wife. One reductive reading identifies the speaker as a woman in a patriarchal society who can escape victimhood only by joining forces with the ruthless male hunter, the gun’s owner. To Helen McNeil, a scholar influenced by Paul de Man, the solution to the final stanza is that “Dickinson knows she is immortal” – knows that her poems will live on. “The poet as pure poem-machine never dies,” McNeil writes, as if the immortality Dickinson imagined were between the covers of a book, a purely linguistic accomplishment.[1] Cynthia Griffin Wolff argues that the poem’s speaker is Death, and I suppose that, by the logic of a metonymy, with the gun a stand-in for Death, you can make the case.[2] But while it may help us to understand the riddling paradoxes of the poem’s great final stanza, the danger of this reading is that it disregards the opening words of the poem: “My Life had stood.” No, the speaker is not death but a gun with “a Life”; not an end but a means; “pure instrumentality,” as Helen McNeil would have it. In a turn of phrase that vaults me back to the 1980s and the heyday of deconstructive criticism, McNeil adds her view that the poem has “an element of sublime parody” because “to be a gun is to be only a gun.”

          Leave aside interpretation imposed on the poem from without, whether based on biographical speculation, theoretical position, or ideological conviction, all of which are on display in Dickinson criticism. The critics, ingenious though some are, do not give enough thought to the religious impulse in Dickinson’s poetry – and to the extent that her art illustrates the maxim that sacred things surround themselves with mystery.

Let’s look at the uncanny last stanza, the “closing riddle-signature” (Wolff). The chiasmus, or reversal of terms, in the first two lines is breathtaking: “Though I than He - may longer live / He longer must - than I -”  Then comes the magnificence of the final paradox. “For I have but the power to kill, / Without - the power to die – ” The rifle has the power to kill – we can see that. The rifle may endure longer than its mortal owner if it is well-made and has been used and cleaned with care. But what is the power to die that the master has?

As a Romantic in the mode of Keats, Dickinson is capable of transmuting death into “an ecstasy of woe.” She believes in an afterlife that makes sense of life and death. The metaphor of hunter and gun is at the service of this belief. When, in “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty,” the assertion depends on the same associative logic that animates Dickinson’s poems. If roses were not subject to the laws of birth, growth, decay, and death, would they be as beautiful? Were all to survive any and all fatal shocks, could our actions have any moral significance? In the moral realm, therefore, to die is a “power” informing all human acts and justifying virtuous lives.

In the final stanza of Dickinson’s poem, the distinction between “may” (indicating possibility) and “must” (implying both inevitability and a moral imperative) is all important. As an inanimate object, the rifle may outlive its owner, just as a pencil may outlive an author. But as a bare, forked animal with a soul, the owner must live longer if we understand time under the aspect of eternity – if there is such a thing as eternity, and our actions live on after us and have a moral value. And to die is a “power,” not just a necessity but also a privilege, because it is death that gives consequence to human agency. Emily may not have approved of Walt Whitman’s long lines and “barbaric yawp” – she never read him but says she heard that he was “disgraceful”  --  but she would certainly have agreed with him that “to die is different from what anyone suppos’d, and luckier.” Death is the pre-condition for the immortality of the soul, the affirmation of which may be the most radical thing about Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

Ed. Note: For part one of this essay, click here. For the author's reading of "Ozymandias," click here.

[1] Helen McNeil, Emily Dickinson (Virago, 1986), pp. 174-178.

[2] Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Dickinson’s Use of the Romantic Grotesque” in Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Judith Farr (Prentice-Hall, 1996), p. 128

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

Comments

[Jacqueline Lapidus]

This blog entry omits an internationally recognized authority on Dickinson's work. Paula Bennett, Professor Emerita of English literature (Southern Illinois University-Carbondale), is a specialist in nineteenth-century American women's poetry and the author of numerous books, including My Life a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics and Poets in the Public Sphere: the Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900 (Beacon Press 1986, new ed. 2018) and Emily Dickinson, Woman Poet (E.E.Root 2018). Her essays have appeared widely in journals and collections.

[Slow Reader]

Truly enjoying this series on Emily Dickinson!
Please continue with these commentaries!
also: Helen Vendler has published a great book of her commentaries on selected Dickinson poems

[David Lehman]

Dear Slow Reader: I expect to put up more appreciative essays on great poems. This opne appeared recently: https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html
It's about Shelley's "Ozymandias" and, by way of contrast, Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus," her Statue of Liberty poem. It ran under the headliner "What Trumps Vain Boasts" back in June 2017, which sort of lost me a gig.

[David Lehman]

Dear Jacqueline Lapidus: Thank you for the recommendation. I'm sure I overlooked many other books and essayists. So many have written on ED and on that poem in particular. I wasn't trying to be comprehensive, but please feel free to add more about Professor Bennett's reading of the gun poem.

[Grace Schulman]

I read it as a passionate love poem. It's there in the language, in the pent-up speaker's sudden burst of feeling: "and carried Me away," the happy roaming, the hunting, and those beautiful erotic lines following "I guard My Master's Head," the desperate wish that "he longer must" live than I. How could this not be entertained?

[David Lehman]

Thank you for the insightful comment, Grace.