LIFE LIKE A LOADED GUN

A DICKINSON
 PUZZLING POEM 

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

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 Sovreign 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

Opon the Valley glow -

It is as a Vesuvian face

Had let it’s 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 -

 There is something so  moving and  tragic about having the power to kill but not the power to die.
It is as if the speaker sees herself as  just the tool for other people with no autonymy of her own.

Here's another jewel that has a tone  close to sadistic joy in another's pain.

I like a look of Agony...

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true—
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe—

The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death—
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.

All of these by the Belle of Amherst---I have thought her a captivating enigma  since I discovered her poems in high school.

Emily Dickinson is one of the most-speculated-about writers in history — in popular myth, she was a virginal recluse who dressed all in white and then wrote passionate poems that were so unlike anything being written at the time. Relatively little is known about her life, and biographers often try to use clues in her poems to guess about her habits, personality, and sexuality. The Oxford professor Lyndall Gordon published a biography called Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (2010).

In her biography, Gordon has one major theory that is impossible to prove: She thinks that Emily Dickinson was epileptic, and that this explains the strange jolts and bursts of her language. Gordon says that the drugs Dickinson was prescribed could have been used to treat epilepsy, and thinks that if Dickinson was epileptic, it would also explain her reclusiveness — she was scared that she would have a spell of a disease that was still very stigmatized in the 19th century.

Most of Gordon's biography, though, is about the Dickinson family, one of the most prominent families in Amherst. Emily's father was severe, with a strict moral code. She later wrote in a letter to a friend: "His Heart was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists." Emily didn't learn to tell time until she was 15 because she was afraid to tell her father that she hadn't understood his explanation of clocks. Her mother took good care of everyone but was not particularly warm, and she was more interested in cooking, keeping a clean house, and gardening than in the intellectual debates that the rest of the Dickinsons loved.

Emily had two siblings, Austin and Lavinia. Austin was the a handsome and accomplished man. Like his father, and unlike Emily, he was a very public person — he served on countless committees, oversaw civic projects and business ventures, and was deeply involved in his church.

Austin had a 13-year love affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst astronomy professor, a talented and charismatic young woman. Austin and Mabel met in the Homestead several afternoons a week for sexual trysts in the living room, during which Emily was confined upstairs. Mabel's husband knew about their relationship and was fine with it. Austin's wife, Susan, knew about their relationship and was miserable because of it, but she had children and a reputation to uphold.

To make things even more complicated, Emily and Susan were very close. Susan was also a writer, and a good listener, and Emily gave her more than 250 poems over the years. Sue shared her library with Emily, and passed along her favorite books. Emily wrote more than 300 letters to Susan. But it was Mabel, Austin's mistress, whom Emily never once met face-to-face, who ended up editing and publishing her poems and making her famous. The poet had only published a handful of poems during her life.

After Emily's death in 1886 at the age of 55, her sister Lavinia found nearly 1,800 poems in Emily's desk.

When Mabel and Lavinia published the first book of Emily Dickinson's poems in 1890, it went through 11 editions in a year and sold 11,000 copies.

Here is one of my favorite poems by Emily:

Hope is the thing with feathers (254)

Emily Dickinson - 1830-1886

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Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

I know that Saint Paul tells us that there are these three "Faith Hope and Charity but the greatest of these is Charity."

Myself, I find HOPE to be the greatest because it refuses to leave me.  I have lost Faith and Love for long periods of time but HOPE has stayed  when all reasons for Hope have fled.