Essay
Analysing 'My Life had stood - a Loaded gun'
Analysing 'My Life had stood - a Loaded gun' by Emily Dickinson, an A grade exam style answer.
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‘My Life had stood - a Loaded gun -’Explore how Emily Dickinson presents attitudes and feelings of anger/violence in ‘My Life had stood - a
Loaded gun -’ and make connections with one or two other poems from your collection.
You should consider Dickinson’s use of poetic and stylistic techniques and significant literary or other
relevant contexts.
‘My life had stood – a Loaded Gun -’ is a view of the Civil War as an externalisation of her own battle
between autonomy and submission, while she internalized the aspects of the Civil War that
produced the conflict of religious beliefs, anger over authority, suppression of individual rights and
liberties, and the reality of death.
The nation's Civil War is a macrocosm of the civil war Dickinson waged inside herself and it can be
seen in her use of martial imagery. She uses the images of war, battle, weaponry, and death, creating
the semantic field, ‘the gun’, ‘the ricochet’, 'power to kill'. In this poem the speaker's life is fraught
with possibility - the noun phrase, a 'Loaded Gun' is full of dangerous potential. It can be used for
hunting animals for food (‘Hunt the Doe’ and ‘Eider Duck’) and killing people in war. The
premodifier ‘loaded’ has connotations of being primed and ready to go. The gun is ready but the
poem's speaker must decide if, and when, to shoot, who will pull the trigger, and what will be
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