Emily Dickinson’s Poem, “My Life had stood–a Loaded Gun–“

I’d like to offer an existentialist interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s famously perplexing poem, “My Life had stood–A Loaded Gun–” (poem 754 in her collected works). Here’s the poem:

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 Sovereign 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 it’s [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–

What might this “Loaded Gun” be a trope for? My thought is that it’s the directionless and fearful self–the self lacking an immortality project (some family, aesthetic, religious, or nationalist purpose for ordering energies toward leaving a legacy). This is the self standing idle “In Corners,” free, but not really knowing what to do with itself. This is the self that ultimately dies. The mortal, godless, and doubting self, “a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made” (A.E. Housman).

Then this self gets converted. It generates a before-and-after testimony of being swept away from purposelessness into an immortality project larger than its mortal self (in this case, a religious one, becoming a tool of God):

My Life had stood–a Loaded Gun–

In Corners–till a Day

The Owner passed–identified–

And carried Me away–

This is a very Protestant, evangelical–even charismatic–way to talk, and it’s the very thing in real life that Emily Dickinson could never do: give her uniqueness, solitude, and existential freedom over to the will of another (whether to God, a husband, or a cause). Dickinson saw herself as “a kangaroo among the beauty,” a freak, a misfit, and her “Loaded Gun” poem is an ironic critique of the things we give ourselves over to for the sake of meaning, and the consequent rages against Nature and other human beings that follow in our defenses of it:

To foe of His–I’m deadly foe–

None stir the second time–

On whom I lay a Yellow Eye–

Or an emphatic Thumb–

We obtain our immortality by killing at various levels, and we display great confidence where we know that it is actually not warranted, putting us in what Sartre would call “bad faith.” Thus we kill the “little” self–the formerly free but flailing self–to obtain a delusional self– the “bigger” self that we imagine going on after death. We “speak for Him,” not ourselves–we become the instrument to Another’s purposes–and so live under the curse of puppetry:

For I have but the power to kill,

Without–the power to die–

Our immortality projects are paid for with great violence. That’s my reading of Dickinson’s poem.