Reloading That Gun: Reading an Old Poem As if It Matters

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2005 by Mayer, Nancy

It is tempting, if you read Emily Dickinson, and especially if you write about her or try to teach her poems in classes, to cheat; that is, to ignore the ways in which she is not like you, not, for instance, comfortably non-religious, not feminist in the yes-ofcourse way middle-aged academics of certain political persuasions all tend to be, not bored with an old poet's overly familiar obsessions and straining to say something new. Then again, it can be tempting to explain away as "cultural" (that is, to be expected of the daughter of small-town patricians in nineteenth-century New England) her insistence on a personal God (she complains bitterly, in fact, that He is not personal enough), her disengagement with gender issues (even though many of the poems themselves are clearly and passionately identified as the work of a woman), and her obsession with the possibility of (or the possibility of imagining) life after death. It isn't really any more satisfactory to explain her differences from us by confining her to her own time than it is to pretend they don't exist. Clearly, not only the poems but the mind that created them were fiercely original, and she used the time and circumstances where she found herself in unpredictable rather than conventional ways. More viscerally, to use her own favorite metaphor for a successful poem, because her poems "breathe," readers who become devoted to these poems have to account for the way they continue to startle and move us, not as historical documents about other lives, but as accounts of something integral to our own lives that needs to be articulated and understood right now.

Her best poems don't feel like familiar territory, even after you've read them many times over, or memorized them, or taught them every semester for years, but they do feel intimate, as if we find ourselves backed into strange deeply interior spaces that are indisputably our own. They are also serious and philosophically ambitious. It simply doesn't do to attribute passages that seem uncharacteristically naive to an attack of conventionality, nor does it seem honest to stretch a puzzling poem until it complies with our own academic interests. All of which leads me to "that poem," the one I have been avoiding for years, "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -." Most of the ingenious readings I have read of the poem claiming it for feminist rage, for a theory of poetry or language (with or without feminist rage) or, more common lately, for sheer indeterminacy1 have seemed to miss something in both the style and substance of the poem that does not quite conform to the critical obsessions of turn-of-themillennium critics. On the other hand, the reading that I have been developing seems to me uncomfortably stuck in the antebellum United States, a place that has never seemed big enough to contain Dickinson's strangeness. My solution has been to allow Dickinson her obsession with those musty old constructs God and immortality, but to account for the ways in which, using conventional nineteenth-century themes, she gets to me where I live, in a lackadaisically post-Christian corner of the twenty-first century. It occurs to me, when I read the poem this way, that the extraordinary engagement with metaphysical questions that took hold in the pre-Civil War United States and the fact that the language of that engagement is literary language have everything to do with why I continue to read Dickinson's poems as if they matter now and to me.

My dissatisfaction with the many articles I've read on "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -" usually comes to a head in the reading of the last stanza, where the reader is most directly invited into the poem. Its placement and phrasing give it the importance of a punch line, but most published readings seem unsure what to do with it. The stanza is written like the formulaic examples of wit and allusion in old-fashioned riddle books. (It is reminiscent of the coy riddle that Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse solves with the word "Courtship.") Like those, it expects us to venture a guess, here to the questions, Who or what is the speaker? Who or what is "He," who is earlier in the poem referred to as "the Owner" and "my Master"?

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

I am sure that somewhere at least one early reading of this poem provides the most obvious solution for a speaker as steeped in Christian text and iconography as Dickinson: The speaker is Death personified, and "He" is the second person in the Christian trinity, God the Son, humanity's advocate, who overcomes death for believers. In John Donne's words, "And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die," or, in First Corinthians, "The enemy that shall be destroyed is death." The whole exercise is pedantic in a dusty fashion that deserves to be outdated; it seems clumsily grotesque-tacky, actually-for death to challenge us in this self-consciously literary way.