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About

Genius Annotation

Dickinson usues a metaphor — a personified gun — to describe the speaker’s life; a life serving an unidentified “Master”. This gun remains unused in the speaker’s possession until this “Master” or “Owner takes it from her. Until then the speaker/gun serves this man, guarding him.

It is a complex and mystifying idea that has been variously interpreted as; the poet losing herself in a love affair; the poet appropriating male power through termporary possession of the gun; a proto-feminist woman writer whose gun is a pen; the usurpation by a woman writer of male power; the gun’s owner is a God who uses the human female as an instrument of His will.

And yet, all of these are contradicted by the last stanza, which answers none of the questions, and leaves the reader trying to solve an unsolvable riddle. Is the gun a metaphor for the speaker’s life? But if so, how can she — a gun — kill if humans lack “the power to die”? There is no answer.

Structure
The poem comprises six quatrains, that is, stanzas of four lines each. There is an ABCB rhyme scheme, with lines two and four rhyming. In stanzas two, three and five these are consonantly rhymed. The metrical rhythm is iambic — that is comprises metrical feet made up of one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable. The first and third lines of each stanza contain four iambs, so can be described as iambic tetrameter. The second and fourth lines contain three iambs, so the lines are trimeters. This is known as a ballad stanza.

The structure is interesting in that an idea is set up in the first stanza — that of the speaker’s life as a gun — and this is followed through until the beginning of stanza six, where a baffling riddle is set up that contradicts what has gone before.

Langauge and Imagery
The voice is that of a first person speaker, who identifies as a pesonified gun that guards an un-named “Master”. Until, that is, he takes the gun away. This idea is followed through until it is confounded in the last stanza. The central idea spawns several scenarios, for example hunting, a soft pillow bed, the gun guarding the sleeper, and a volcanic mountain. All of these are difficult to interpret, as the annotations indicate.

The sentence structure is typical Dickinson, short phrases, capitalized nouns and frequent dashes. The effect is terse and choppy, as appropriate to a complex poem.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

  1. 25.
    Nature
  2. 53.
    My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun
  3. 60.
    Mowing
  4. 63.
    Design
  5. 72.
    A Pact
  6. 75.
    Oread
  7. 83.
    Africa
  8. 100.
    Howl
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