Critical Analysis of a Poem

Your Name

Instructor 's name

Course

Date

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun

Emily Dickinson 's My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun ' is a powerful poem that takes into account various thematic expressions . Its comprehensiveness in brevity is another essential feature of this poem It symbolizes power and unconventional feminist urges on the art of the poetess . In this poem , Emily Dickinson finds an instrument adequate enough to render her need for fulfillment through absolute commitment to love 's service . The poem begins with a brilliant conceit

. Fused from the ambiguous abstraction of life and the explicit concretion of loaded gun it expresses the charged potential of the human being who remains dormant until identified ' into a conscious vitality . And after hat identification , we observe the start of a new poem i .e . the start of a new life

Historically , it was written in age when American society was torn with civil war . The symbol that Emily Dickenson has used is an essence of an experience . It is quite obvious that a universal insight that the poet tries to express in not obtained merely by imaginative wandering , it is based on concrete experiences . Emily Dickinson presents the same insight into the historical experiences of her time . The very first stanza symbolizes the paradox of finding oneself through losing oneself . It is rendered in the poem by one word : identity is claimed when someone claimed the gun as her own . The American civil war was also the process of finding ones own identity by losing ones own identity . The internal rivalries and petty identities were to be removed to achieve a national reconciliation . This national reconciliation ultimately brought the national identity . Although this process was on halt and stayed in corners ' for many decades till a day came . Now they roam in Sovereign Woods

So Emily Dickinson has epitomized a national experience . Now this gun ' is foe of His - I 'm deadly foe . His can be described in various connotations . His ' is emblem of nation state that is fully sovereign . His ' is an integrated society or the one who longs to be integrated after the pathos and miseries of Civil war . Poetess further emphasize that stir the second time - / whom I lay a Yellow Eye - an emphatic Thumb . All these gestures are for those who are internal or external antagonists to the new national experience

This poem has also captivated the feminist attention who has given it a new evaluative dimension . Some critics are of the view that thorough this poem , Emily has tried to present a woman that she was not primarily in the second half of the 19th century whereas other feminist critics holds the view that poem main metaphor considers everything [that] "woman " is not : cruel not pleasant , hard not soft , emphatic not weak , one who kills not one who nurtures (Bennet , 1986

But Emily Dickinson has provided a framework of power i .e . feminine power and established certain pattern on which women...