Because I could not stop for Death (479)Emily Dickinson,1830-1886Because I could not stop for DeathHe kindly stopped for me The Carriage held but just Ourselves And Immortality.

We slowly droveHe knew no hasteAnd I had put awayMy labor and my leisure too,For His Civility

We passed the School, where Children stroveAt Recessin the Ring We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain We passed the Setting Sun

Or ratherHe passed usThe Dews drew quivering and chillFor only Gossamer, my GownMy Tippetonly Tulle

We paused before a House that seemedA Swelling of the GroundThe Roof was scarcely visibleThe Cornicein the Ground

Since thentis Centuriesand yetFeels shorter than the DayI first surmised the Horses Heads Were toward Eternity"Because I could not stop for Death" is alyrical poembyEmily Dickinsonfirst published posthumously inPoems: Series 1in 1890. The poem is aboutDeath. Dickinson personifies him (death) as a gentleman caller who takes a leisurely carriage ride with the poet to her grave. According toThomas H. Johnson[disambiguation needed]'svariorum editionof 1955 the number of this poem is 712.Summary[edit]The poem was published posthumously in 1890 inPoems: Series 1, a collection of Dickinson's poems assembled and edited by her friendsMabel Loomis ToddandThomas Wentworth Higginson. The poem was published under the title "The Chariot". It is composed in sixquatrainswith the meter alternating betweeniambic tetrameterandiambic trimeter. Stanzas 1, 2, 4, and 6 employend rhymein their second and fourth lines, but some of these are only close rhyme oreye rhyme. In the third stanza, there is no end rhyme, but "ring" in line 2 rhymes with "gazing" and "setting" in lines 3 and 4 respectively. Internal rhyme is scattered throughout.Figures of speechincludealliteration,anaphora,paradox, andpersonification. The poem personifies Death as a gentleman caller who takes a leisurely carriage ride with the poet to her grave. She also personifies immortality.[1]Critique[edit]In 1936Allen Tatewrote, "[The poem] exemplifies better than anything else [Dickinson] wrote the special quality of her mind ... If the word great means anything in poetry, this poem is one of the greatest in the English language; it is flawless to the last detail. The rhythm charges with movement the pattern of suspended action back of the poem. Every image is precise and, moreover, not merely beautiful, but inextricably fused with the central idea. Every image extends and intensifies every other ... No poet could have invented the elements of [this poem]; only a great poet could have used them so perfectly. Miss Dickinson was a deep mind writing from a deep culture, and when she came to poetry, she came infallibly.[2]Musical settings[edit]The poem has been set to music byAaron Coplandas the twelfth song of hissong cycleTwelve Poems of Emily Dickinson. And again, byJohn Adamsas the second movement of hischoral symphonyHarmonium, and also set to music byNicholas J. Whiteas a single movement piece for chorus and chamber orchestra. Natalie Merchant and Susan McKeown have created a song of the same name while preserving Dickinson's exact poem in its lyrics.Type of WorkBecause I Could Not Stop for Death is alyricpoem on the theme of death. The contains six stanzas, each with four lines. A four-line stanza is called a quatrain. The poem was first published in 1890 inPoems, Series 1, a collection of Miss Dickinson's poems that was edited by two of her friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The editors titled the poem "Chariot."Commentary and ThemeBecause I Could Not Stop for Death reveals Emily Dickinsons calm acceptance of death. It is surprising that she presents the experience as being no more frightening than receiving a gentleman callerin this case, her fianc (Death personified).The journey to the grave begins in Stanza 1, when Death comes calling in a carriage in which Immortality is also a passenger. As the trip continues in Stanza 2, thecarriage trundles along at an easy, unhurried pace, perhaps suggesting that death has arrived in the form of a disease or debility that takes its time to kill. Then, in Stanza 3, the author appears to review the stages of her life: childhood (the recess scene), maturity (the ripe, hence, gazing grain), and the descent into death (the setting sun)as she passes to the other side. There, she experiences a chill because she is not warmly dressed. In fact, her garments are more appropriate for a wedding, representing a new beginning, than for a funeral, representing an end.Her description of the grave as her house indicates how comfortable she feels about death. There, after centuries pass, so pleasant is her new life that time seems to stand still, feeling shorter than a Day.The overall theme of the poem seems to be that death is not to be feared since it is a natural part of the endless cycle of nature. Her view of death may also reflect her personality and religious beliefs. On the one hand, as a spinster, she was somewhat reclusive and introspective, tending to dwell on loneliness and death. On the other hand, as a Christian and a Bible reader, she was optimistic about her ultimate fate and appeared to see death as a friend.CharactersSpeaker: A woman who speaks from the grave. She says she calmly accepted death. In fact, she seemed to welcome death as a suitor whom she planned to "marry."Death: Suitor who called for the narrator to escort her to eternity.Immortality: A passenger in the carriage.Children: Boys and girls at play in a schoolyard. They symbolize childhood as a stage of life.Text and NotesBecause I could not stop for Death,He kindly stopped for me;The carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality.We slowly drove, he knew no haste,And I had put awayMy labor, and my leisure too,For his civility.We passed the school, where children stroveAt recess, in the ring;We passed the fields of gazing grain,We passed the setting sun.Or rather, he passed us;The dews grew quivering and chill,For only gossamer mygown,1Mytippet2onlytulle.3We paused before ahouse4that seemedA swelling of the ground;The roof was scarcely visible,Thecornice5but a mound.Since then 'tis centuries,6and yet eachFeels shorter than the dayI first surmised the horses' headsWere toward eternity.Notes1...gossamer my gown: Thin wedding dress for the speaker's marriage to Death.2...tippet: Scarf for neck or shoulders.3...tulle: Netting.4...house: Speaker's tomb.5...cornice: Horizontal molding along the top of a wall.6...Since . . . centuries: The length of time she has been in the tomb.n this poem, Dickinsons speaker is communicating from beyond the grave, describing her journey withDeath, personified, from life to afterlife. In the opening stanza, the speaker is too busy for Death (Because I could not stop for Death), so Deathkindlytakes the time to do what she cannot, and stops for her.This civility that Death exhibits in taking time out for her leads her to give up on those things that had made her so busyAnd I had put away/My labor and my leisure tooso they can just enjoy this carriage ride (We slowly drove He knew no haste).In the third stanza we see reminders of the world that the speaker is passing from, with children playing and fields of grain. Her place in the world shifts between this stanza and the next; in the third stanza, We passed the Setting Sun, but at the opening of the fourth stanza, she corrects thisOr rather He passed Us because she has stopped being an active agent, and is only now a part of the landscape.In this stanza, after the realization of her new place in the world, her death also becomes suddenly very physical, as The Dews drew quivering and chill, and she explains that her dress is only gossamer, and her Tippet, a kind of cape usually made out of fur, is only Tulle.After this moment of seeing the coldness of her death, the carriage pauses at her new House. The description of the houseA Swelling of the Groundmakes it clear that this is no cottage, but instead a grave. Yet they only pause at this house, because although it is ostensibly her home, it is really only a resting place as she travels to eternity.The final stanza shows a glimpse of this immortality, made most clear in the first two lines, where she says that although it has been centuries since she has died, it feels no longer than a day. It is not just any day that she compares it to, howeverit is the very day of her death, when she saw the Horses Heads that were pulling her towards this eternity.AnalysisDickinsons poems deal with death again and again, and it is never quite the same in any poem. In Because I could not stop for Death, we see death personified. He is no frightening, or even intimidating, reaper, but rather a courteous and gentle guide, leading her to eternity. The speaker feels no fear when Death picks her up in his carriage, she just sees it as an act of kindness, as she was too busy to find time for him.It is this kindness, this individual attention to herit is emphasized in the first stanza that the carriage holds just the two of them, doubly so because of the internal rhyme in held and ourselvesthat leads the speaker to so easily give up on her life and what it contained. This is explicitly stated, as it is For His Civility that she puts away her labor and her leisure, which is Dickinson using metonymy to represent another alliterative wordher life.Indeed, the next stanza shows the life is not so great, as this quiet, slow carriage ride is contrasted with what she sees as they go. A school scene of children playing, which could be emotional, is instead only an example of the difficulty of lifealthough the children are playing At Recess, the verb she uses is strove, emphasizing the labors of existence. The use of anaphora with We passed also emphasizes the tiring repetitiveness of mundane routine.The next stanza moves to present a more conventional vision of deaththings become cold and more sinister, the speakers dress is not thick enough to warm or protect her. Yet it quickly becomes clear that though this part of deaththe coldness, and the next stanzas image of the grave as homemay not be ideal, it is worth it, for it leads to the final stanza, which ends with immortality. Additionally, the use of alliteration in this stanza that emphasizes the material trappingsgossamer gown and tippet tullemakes the stanza as a whole less sinister.That immorality is the goal is hinted at in the first stanza, where Immortality is the only other occupant of the carriage, yet it is only in the final stanza that we see that the speaker has obtained it. Time suddenly loses its meaning; hundreds of years feel no different than a day. Because time is gone, the speaker can still feel with relish that moment of realization, that death was not just death, but immortality, for she surmised the Horses Heads/Were toward Eternity . By ending with Eternity , the poem itself enacts this eternity, trailing out into the infinite.My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764)BYEMILY DICKINSONMy Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -In Corners - till a DayThe 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 HimThe Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial lightOpon the Valley glow -It is as a Vesuvian faceHad let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -I guard My Masters Head -Tis better than the Eider DucksDeep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - Im deadly foe -None stir the second time -On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer liveHe longer must - than I -For I have but the power to kill,Without - the power to die -The Poems of Emily Dickinson,Edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Source:The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition ed by Ralph W. Franklin(Harvard University Press, 1999)On 754 ("My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--")

Adrienne RichThere is one poem which is the real "onlie begetter" of my thoughts here about Dickinson; a poem I have mused over, repeated to myself, taken into myself over many years. I think it is a poem about possession by the daemon, about the dangers and risks of such possession if you are a woman, about the knowledge that power in a woman can seem destructive, and that you cannot live without the daemon once it has possessed you. The archetype of the daemon as masculine is beginning to change, but it has been real for women up until now. But this woman poet also perceives herself as a lethal weapon:[. . . .]Here the poet sees herself as split, not between anything so simple as "masculine" and "feminine" identify but between the hunter, admittedly masculine, but also a human person, an active, willing being, and the gun--an object, condemned to remain inactive until the hunter--the owner--takes possession of it. The gun contains an energy capable of rousing echoes in the mountains, and lighting up the valleys; it is also deadly, "Vesuvian"; it is also its owner's defender against the "foe." It is the gun, furthermore, whospeaksfor him. If there is a female consciousness in this poem, it is buried deeper than the images: it exists in the ambivalence toward power, which is extreme. Active willing and creation in women are forms of aggression, and aggression is both "the power to kill" and punishable by death. The union of gun with hunter embodies the danger of identifying and taking hold of her forces, not least that in so doing she risks defining herself--and being defined--as aggressive, is unwomanly ("and now we hunt the Doe"), and as potentially lethal. That which she experiences in herself as energy and potency call also be experienced as pure destruction. The final stanza, with its precarious balance of phrasing, seems a desperate attempt to resolve the ambivalence; but, I think, it is no resolution, only a further extension of ambivalence.Though I than he--may longer liveHe longer mustthan IFor I have but the power to kill,Without--the power to die--The poet experiences herself as loaded gun, imperious energy; yet without the Owner, the possessor, she is merely lethal. Should that possession abandon her--but the thought is unthinkable: "He longer must than I." The pronoun is masculine; the antecedent is what Keats called "The Genius of Poetry."I do not pretend to have--I don't even wish to have--explained this poem, accounted for its every image; it will reverberate with new tones long after my words about it have ceased to matter. But I think that for us, at this time, it is a central poem in understanding Emily Dickinson, and ourselves, and the condition of the woman artist, particularly in the nineteenth century. It seems likely that the nineteenth-century woman poet, especially, felt the medium of poetry as dangerous, in ways that the woman novelist did not feel the medium of fiction to be. In writing even such a novel of elemental sexuality and anger asWutheringHeights,Emily Bront could at least theoretically separate herself from her characters; they were, after all, fictitious beings. Moreover, the novel is or can be a construct, planned and organized to deal with human experiences on one level at a time. Poetry is too much rooted in the unconscious; it presses too close against the barriers of repression; and the nineteenth-century woman had much to repress.From "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson." Reprinted inOn Lies, Secrets, and Silences. (W.W. Norton, 1979).

Paula BennettNo poem written by a woman poet more perfectly captures the nature, the difficulties, and the risks involved in this task of self-redefinition and self-empowerment than the poem that stands at the center of this book, Emily Dickinson's brilliant and enigmatic "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun":[. . . .]Composed during the period when Dickinson had reached the height of her poetic prowess, "My Life had stood" represents the poet's most extreme attempt to characterize the Vesuvian nature of the power or art which she believed was hers. Speaking through the voice of a gun, Dickinson presents herself in this poem as everything "woman" is not: cruel not pleasant, hard not soft, emphatic not weak, one who kills not one who nurtures. just as significant, she is proud of it, so proud that the temptation is to echo Robert Lowell's notorious description of Sylvia Plath, and say that in "My Life had stood," Emily Dickinson is "hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another 'poetess."Like the persona in Plath'sArielpoems, in "My Life had stood," Dickinson's speaker has deliberately shed the self-protective layers of conventional femininity, symbolized in the poem by the doe and the deep pillow of the "masochistic" eider duck. In the process the poet uncovers the true self within, in all its hardness and rage, in its desire for revenge and aggressive, even masculine, sexuality (for this is, after all, one interpretation of the gun in the poem). The picture of Dickinson that emerges, like the picture of Plath that emerges from the "big strip tease" of "Lady Lazarus" (CP245) and otherArielpoems, is not an attractive one. But, again like Plath, Dickinson is prepared to embrace it nevertheless--together with all other aspects of her unacceptable self. Indeed, embracing the true or unacceptable self appears to be the poem's raison d'etre, just as it is the raison d'etre of Plath's last poems.In writing "My Life had stood," Dickinson clearly transgresses limits no woman, indeed no human being, could lightly afford to break. And to judge by the poem's final riddling stanza, a conundrum that critics have yet to solve satisfactorily, she knew this better than anyone. As Adrienne Rich has observed, Dickinson's underlying ambivalence toward the powers her speaker claims to exercise through her art (the powers to "hunt," "speak, " "smile," "guard," and "kill") appears to be extreme. Of this ambivalence and its effect on women poets, Rich has written most poignantly, perhaps, because of her own position as poet. For Rich there is no easy way to resolve the conflict entangling Dickinson in the poem. "If there is a femaleconsciousness in this poem," she writes,it is buried deeper than the images: it exists in the ambivalence toward power, which is extreme. Active willing and creation in women are forms of aggression, and aggression is both "the power to kill" and punishable by death. The union of gun with hunter embodies the danger of identifying and taking hold of her forces, not least that in so doing she risks defining herself--and being defined--as aggressive, as unwomanly ("and now We hunt the Doe"), and as potentially lethal.Yet despite these dangers and despite her recognition of the apparent dehumanization her persona courts, in "My Life had stood" Emily Dickinson does take precisely the risks that Rich describes. In the poem's terms, she is murderous. She is a gun. Her rage is part of her being. Indeed, insofar as it permits her to explode and hence to speak, rage defines her, unwomanly and inhuman though it is. Whatever constraints existed in her daily life (the breathless and excessive femininity so well described by her preceptor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson), inwardly it would seem Emily Dickinson was not to be denied. In her art she was master of herself, whatever that self was, however aggressive, unwomanly, or even inhuman society might judge it to be.Given Dickinson's time and upbringing, it would, of course, have been unlikely that she, any more than we today, would have been comfortable with the high degree of anger and alienation which she exhibits in this extraordinary poem. But the anger and the alienation are there and, whether we are comfortable or not, like Dickinson we must deal with them. If, as Adrienne Rich asserts, "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun" is a "central poem in understanding Emily Dickinson, and ourselves, and the condition of the woman artist, particularly in the nineteenth century," it is so precisely because Dickinson was prepared to grapple in it with so many unacceptable feelings within herself. Whatever else "My Life had stood" may be about, it is about the woman as artist, the woman who must deny her femininity, even perhaps her humanity, if she is to achieve the fullness of her self and the fullness of her power in her verse.FromMy Life a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich, and Female Creativity. Copyright 1986 by Paula Bennett. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Cristanne MillerIn "My Life had stood" [. . .] Dickinson compares an action in the present tense to one in the past or present perfect:And do I smile, such cordial lightUpon the Valley glow--It is as a Vesuvian faceHad let its pleasure through--And when at Night--Our good Day doneI guard My Master's Head--'Tis better than the Eider-Duck'sDeep Pillow--to have shared--In the first instance, the speaker/Gun compares her smile to the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Her smile is not like the volcano's fire or threat but like its completed act: when she smiles it is as if a volcano had erupted. The past perfect verb is more chilling than the present tense would be because it signals completion, even in the midst of a speculative ("as if') comparison; her smile has the cordiality of ash, of accomplished violence or death, not just of present fire. In the second instance, the speaker prefers guarding the master to having shared his pillow, that is, to having shared intimacy with him--primarily sexual, one would guess from the general structure of the poem. Again, the comparison contrasts action with effect rather than action with action (and when I guard . . . 'tis better than sharing ... ). As a consequence, the speaker seems ironically and almost condescendingly distant from the world of life (here, of potential life-creation or love). Shared intimacy, in her view, would bring nothing better than aggressive self-reliance does. Both uses of the perfect tense in this poem distance the speaker from humanity, perhaps as any skewed analogy would. Yet by allying herself with catastrophic power rather than sexual intimacy, she may also be indicating that the former seems more possible or safer to her; even the power of volcanoes may be known. The change in tense alerts the reader to the peculiarity and the importance of the comparisons.FromEmily Dickinson: A Poets Grammar. Copyright 1987 by Harvard University Press.

Mary LoeffelholzThe Dickinson poem that Rich so presciently invoked in 1965, "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun" (poem 754), has since then attracted diverse interpretations, especially feminist interpretations. It has become the locus of discussion for feminist critics concerned about accounting in some way for the aggression of Dickinson's poetry, beginning with Rich herself. In her 1975 essay "Vesuvius at Home," Rich names "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--" as the "'onlie begetter"' of her vision of Dickinson, the poem Rich had "taken into myself over many years."' The language of Rich's critical essay suggestively echoes the issues of the poems Dickinson had already haunted and would later haunt for Rich. While not explicitly violent in the way of Dickinson's loaded gun, Rich's metaphor of incorporating, eating Dickinson's poem establishes, but only to transgress, the boundary between inside and outside. Invoking the dedication to the "onlie begetter" of Shakespeare's sonnets identifies Dickinson's poem with a male literary tradition (although the overriding aim of Rich's essay is to link Dickinson to other women writers) and identifies Dickinson herself with a phallic power (the loaded gun's power) of inseminating Rich's thoughts. It is hardly necessary to add that Rich's language is intimately, evocatively complicit in these respects with the language of Dickinson's poem itself. What it means to be inside or outside another identity; what it means to "take in" or possess; the very meaning of a boundary--are put into question by "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--." In this and other poems, Dickinson's often violent transactions with what is "outside" her reflect a situation for women poets of the dominant Anglo-American tradition in which, according to Joanne Feit Diehl, "the 'Other' is particularly dangerous ... because he recognizes no boundaries, extending his presence into and through herself, where the self's physical processes, such as breath and pain, may assume a male identity." The male Other who occasions her speech may also commandeer her very bodily identity, leaving nno refuge of interiority that is her own. Adrienne Richs reading of "My Life had stood" internalizes Dickinson's struggle with the problem of boundary and violence, rendering Dickinson both as the Other male ravisher and as an aspect of Rich's own interior.FromDickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory. Copyright 1991 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Albert GelpiDespite the narrative manner, it is no more peopled than the rest of Dickinson's poems, which almost never have more than two figures: the speaker and another, often an anonymous male figure suggestive of a lover or of God or of both. So here: I and "My Master," the "Owner" of my life. Biographers have tried to sift the evidence to identify the "man" in the central drama of the poetry. Three draft-"letters" from the late 1850s and early 1860s, confessing in overwrought language her passionate love for the "Master" and her pain at his rejection, might seem to corroborate the factual basis for the relationship examined in this poem, probably written in 1863. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the fact that biographers have been led to different candidates, with the fragmentary evidence pointing in several directions inconclusively, has deepened my conviction that "he" is not a real human being whom Dickinson knew and loved and lost or renounced, but a psychological presence or factor in her inner life. Nor does the identification of "him" with Jesus or with God satisfactorily explain many of the poems, including the poem under discussion here. I have come, therefore, to see "him" as an image symbolic of certain aspects of her own personality, qualities and needs and potentialities which have been identified culturally and psychologically with the masculine, and which she consequently perceived and experienced as masculine.Carl Jung called this "masculine" aspect of the woman's psyche her "animus," corresponding to the postulation of an "anima" as the "feminine" aspect of the man's psyche. The anima or animus, first felt as the disturbing presence of the "other" in ones self, thus holds the key to fulfillment and can enable the man or the woman to suffer through the initial crisis of alienation and conflict to assimilate the "other" into an integrated identity. In the struggle toward wholeness the animus and the anima come to mediate the whole range of experience for the woman and the man: her and his connection with nature and sexuality on the one hand and with spirit on the other. No wonder that the animus and the anima appear in dreams, myths, fantasies, and works of art as figures at once human and divine, as lover and god. Such a presence is Emily Dickinson's Master and Owner in the poem.However, for women in a society like ours which enforces the subjection of women in certain assigned roles, the process of growth and integration becomes especially fraught with painful risks and traps and ambivalences. Nevertheless, here, as in many poems, Dickinson sees the chance for fulfillment in her relationship to the animus figure, indeed in her identification with him. Till he came, her life had known only inertia, standing neglected in tight places, caught at the right angles of walls: not just a corner, the first lines of the poem tell us, but corners, as though wherever she stood was thereby a constricted place. But all the time she knew that she was something other and more. Paradoxically, she attained her prerogatives through submission to the internalized masculine principle. In the words of the poem, the release of her power depended on her being "carried away"--rapt, "raped"--by her Owner and Master. Moreover, by further turns of the paradox, a surrender of womanhood transformed her into a phallic weapon, and in return his recognition and adoption "identified" her.Now we can begin to see why the serious fantasy of this poem makes her animus a hunter and woodsman. With instinctive rightness Dickinson's imagination grasps her situation in terms of the major myth of the American experience. The pioneer on the frontier is the version of the universal hero myth indigenous to our specific historical circumstances, and it remains today, even in our industrial society, the mythic mainstay of American individualism. The pioneer claims his manhood by measuring himself against the unfathomed, unfathomable immensity of his elemental world, whose "otherness" he experiences at times as the inhuman, at times as the feminine, at times as the divine--most often as all three at once. His link with landscape, therefore, is a passage into the unknown in his own psyche, the mystery of his unconscious. For the man the anima is the essential point of connection with woman and with deity.But all too easily, sometimes all too unwittingly, connection--which should move to union--can gradually fall into competition, then contention and conflict. The man who reaches out to Nature to engage his basic physical and spiritual needs finds himself reaching out with the hands of the predator to possess and subdue, to make Nature serve his own ends. From the point of view of Nature, then, or of woman or of the values of the feminine principle the pioneer myth can assume a devastating and tragic significance, as our history has repeatedly demonstrated. Forsaking the institutional structures of patriarchal culture, the woodsman goes out alone, or almost alone, to test whether his mind and will are capable of outwitting the lures and wiles of Nature, her dark children and wild creatures. If he can vanquish her--Mother Nature, Virgin Land--then he can assume or resume his place in society and as boon exact his share of the spoils of Nature and the service of those, including women and the dark-skinned peoples, beneath him in the established order.In psychosexual terms, therefore, the pioneer's struggle against the wilderness can be seen, from the viewpoint, to enact the subjugation of the feminine principle, whose dark mysteries are essential to the realization of personal and social identity but for that reason threaten masculine prerogatives in a patriarchal ordering of individual and social life. The hero fights to establish his ego-identity and assure the linear transmission of the culture which sustains his ego-identity, and he does so by maintaining himself against the encroachment of the Great Mother. Her rhythm is the round of Nature, and her sovereignty is destructive to the independent individual because the continuity of the round requires that she devour her children and absorb their lives and consciousness back into her teeming womb, season after season, generation after generation. So the pioneer who may first have ventured into the woods to discover the otherness which is the clue to identity may in the end find himself maneuvering against the feminine powers, weapon in hand, with mind and will as his ultimate weapons for self-preservation. No longer seeker or lover, he advances as the aggressor, murderer, rapist.As we have seen, in this poem Emily Dickinson accedes to the "rape," because she longs for the inversion of sexual roles which, from the male point of view, allows a hunter or a soldier to call his phallic weapon by a girl's name and speak of it, even to it, as a woman. Already by the second stanza "I" and "he" have become "We": "And now We roam in Sovreign Woods-- / And now We hunt the Doe--," the rhythm and repetition underscoring the momentous change of identity. However, since roaming "in Sovreign Woods--," or, as the variant has it, roaming "the--Sovreign Woods--" is a contest of survival, it issues in bloodshed. "To foe of His--I'm deadly foe," she boasts later, and here their first venture involves hunting the doe. It is important that the female of the deer is specified, for Dickinson's identification of herself with the archetype of the hero in the figure of the woodsman seems to her to necessitate a sacrifice of her womanhood, explicitly the range of personality and experience as sexual and maternal woman. In just a few lines she has converted her "rape" by the man into a hunting-down of Mother Nature's creatures by manly comrades--Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook inThe Last of the Mohicans,Natty Bumppo and Hurry Harry inThe Deerslayer.[. . . .]In the psychological context of this archetypal struggle Emily Dickinson joins in the killing of the doe without a murmur of pity or regret; she wants the independence of will and the power of mind which her allegiance with the woodsman makes possible. Specifically, engagement with the animus unlocks her artistic creativity; through his inspiration and mastery she becomes a poet. The variant for "power" in the last line is "art," and the irresistible force of the rifle's muzzle-flash and of the bullet are rendered metaphorically in terms of the artist's physiognomy: his blazing countenance ("Vesuvian face"), his vision ("Yellow Eye"), his shaping hand ("emphatic Thimb"), his responsive heart ("cordial light"). So it is that when the hunter fires the rifle, "I speak for Him--." Without his initiating pressure on the trigger, there would be no incandescence; but without her as seer and craftsman there would be no art. From their conjunction issues the poem's voice, reverberant enough to make silent nature echo with her words.In Hebrew the word "prophet" means to "speak for." The prophet translates the wordless meanings of the god into human language. Whitman defined the prophetic function of the poet in precisely these terms: "it means one whose mind bubbles up and pours forth as a fountain from inner, divine spontaneities revealing God.... The great matter is to reveal and outpour the God-like suggestions pressing for birth in the soul."' Just as in the male poetic tradition such divine inspiration is characteristically experienced as mediated through the anima and imaged as the poet's muse, so in this poem the animus figure functions as Dickinson's masculine muse. Where Whitman experiences inspiration as the gushing flux of the Great Mother, Dickinson experiences it as the Olympian fire: the gun-blast and Vesuvius. In several poems Dickinson depicts herself as a smoldering volcano, the god's fire flaring in the bosom of the female landscape. In her first conversation with the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson remarked: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I knowthatis poetry. Is there any other way."But why is the creative faculty also destructive, Eros inseparable from Thanatos? To begin with, for a woman like Dickinson, choosing to be an artist could seem to require denying essential aspects of herself and relinquishing experience as lover, wife, and mother. From other poems we know Dickinson's painfully, sometimes excruciatingly divided attitude toward her womanhood, but here under the spell of the animus muse she does not waver in the sacrifice. Having spilled the doe's blood during the day's hunt, she stations herself for the night ("Our good Day done--") as stiff, soldierly guard at "My Master's Head," scorning to enter the Master's bed and sink softly into "the Eider-Duck's/ Deep Pillow." Her rejection of the conventional sexual and domestic role expected of women is further underscored by the fact that the variant for "Deep" is "low" ("the Eider-Duck's /Low Pillow") and by the fact that the eider-duck is known not merely for the quality of her down but for lining her nest by plucking the feathers from her own breast. No such "female masochism" for this doeslayer; she is "foe" to "foe of His," the rhyme with "doe" effecting the grim inversion.Moreover, compounding the woman's alternatives, which exact part of herself no matter how she chooses, stands the essential paradox of art: that the artist kills experience into art, for temporal experience can only escape death by dying into the "immortality" of artistic form. . . .Both the poet's relation to her muse and the living death of the artwork lead into the runic riddle of the last quatrain. It is actually a double riddle, each two lines long connected by the conjunction "for" and by the rhyme:Though I than He--may longer liveHe longer must--than I--For I have but the power to kill,Without--the power to die--In the first rune, why is it that shemaylive longer than he but hemustlive longer than she? The poet lives on past the moment in which she is a vessel or instrument in the hands of the creative animus for two reasons--first, because her temporal life resumes when she is returned to one of life's corners, a waiting but loaded gun again, but also because on another level she surpasses momentary possession by the animus in the poem she has created under his inspiration. At the same time, hemusttranscend her temporal life and even its artifacts because, as the archetypal source of inspiration, the animus is, relative to the individual, transpersonal and so in a sense "immortal."The second rune extends the paradox of the poet's mortality and survival. The lines begin to unravel and reveal themselves if we read the phrase "Without--the power to die" not as "lacking the power to die" but rather as "except for the power to die," "unless I had the power to die." The lines would then read: unless she were mortal, if she did not have the power to die, she would have only the power to kill. And when we straighten out the grammatical construction of a condition-contrary-to-fact to conform with fact, we come closer to the meaning: with mortality, if she does have the power to die--as indeed she does--she would not have only the power to kill. What else or what more would she then have? There are two clues. First, the variant of "art" for "power" in the last line links "the power to die," mortality, all the more closely with "the power to kill," the artistic process. In addition, the causal conjunction "for" relates the capacity for death in the second rune back to the capacity for life in the first rune. Thus, for her the power to die is resolved in the artist's power to kill, whereby she dies into the hypostasized work of art. The animus muse enables her to fix the dying moment, but it is only her human capabilities, working in time with language, which are able to translate that fixed moment into the words on the page. The artistic act is, therefore, not just destructive but in the end self-creative. In a mysterious way the craftsmanship of the doomed artist rescues her exalted moments from oblivion and extends destiny beyond "dying" and "killing."Now we can grasp the two runes together. The poets living and dying permit her to be an artist; impelled by the animus, she is empowered to kill experience and slay herself into art. Having suffered mortality, she "dies into life," as Keats's phrase inHyperionhas it; virgin as the Grecian urn and the passionate figures on it, her poetic self outlasts temporal process and those climactic instants of animus possession, even though in the process of experience she knows him as a free spirit independent of her and transcendent of her poems. In different ways, therefore, each survives the other: she mortal in her person but timeless in her poems, he transpersonal as an archetype but dependent on her transitory experience of him to manifest himself. The interdependence through which she "speaks for" him as his human voice makes both for her dependence and limitations and also for her triumph over dependence and limitation.Nevertheless, "My life had stood--a Loaded Gun--" leaves no doubt that a woman in a patriarchal society achieves that triumph through a blood sacrifice. The poem presents the alternatives unsparingly: be the hunter or the doe. She can refuse to be a victim by casting her lot with the hunter, but thereby she claims herself as victim. By the rules of the hunter's game, there seems no escape for the woman in the woods. Emily Dickinson's sense of conflict within herself and about herself could lead her to such a desperate and ghastly fantasy as the following lines from poem 1737:Rearrange a "Wife's" affection!When they dislocate my Brain!Amputate my freckled Bosom!Make me bearded like a man!The violent, exclamatory self-mutilation indicates how far we have come from the pieties of Mrs. Sigourney and her sisters.Fortunately for Dickinson the alternatives did not always seem so categorical. Some of her most energetic and ecstatic poems--those supreme moments which redeemed the travail and anguish--celebrate her experience of her womanhood. The vigor of these dense lyrics matches in depth and conviction Whitman's sprawling, public celebration of his manhood. At such times she saw her identity not as a denial of her feminine nature in the name of the animus but as an assimilation of the animus into an integrated self.From "Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer: The Dilemma of the Woman Poet in America." InShakespeares Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Copyright 1979 by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

Claudia YukmanThe object status of a subject within a narrative is dramatically played out in Dickinson's frequently discussed poem, "MyLife had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- ." In this poem the subject fears the permanence of the text as much as death, or rather,fears the overdetermination of her subjectivity by the text more than "the power to die."[. . . .]The term "identified" elsewhere in Dickinson's poetry and in her culture at large refers to the conversion experience thatauthorizes the Christian to view his or her life as typified by the narrative of Christ's life. To be able to tell this story, like learninglanguage, permits the individual to be a Christian to another Christian and to herself. Dickinson's poem is told by the object it isabout and thus gives expression to the object positions we all occupy within social-symbolic codes. The Christian narrative form in this poem is enacted as the object/instrument life of the gun. The master gives dramatic form to the prior narrative, ormaster story, which confers identity on the gun. The "Sovereign Woods" designate the limits within which both the master andgun are free, an analogue for the freedom invented by, but limited to, the Christian narrative.

But during the process of the poem the object (the gun) increasingly takes on subject status. Already in the second verse the gun speaks "for" the master, which is to say she perceives her function as an extension of his power: his will and figuratively, his voice. But in the mountain's reply to this speech the gun experiences her own singular effect on the world. In the third verse she no longer acts for the master but describes an exchange between herself and the mountain. There is a greater equality between the gun and the mountain than between the master and the gun because they respond to each other's alterity or otherness. Interestingly, this situation of alterity and reciprocity is represented as the elision of narrative (in the loss of a syntactical antecedent to the pronoun "it") in the line "It is as a Vesuvian face / Had let its pleasure through." In recognizing the alterity symbolized by the "reply" of the mountain, which entails that it recognize its own otherness, the gun experiences an identity distinct from her purpose in the master's life (or the master story). In the fourth verse, though she still serves her master by "guarding his head," the gun expresses preference for the pleasure her autonomy and alterity allow her."'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's / Deep pillow -- to have shared -- " to guard the master's head.But perhaps more significantly, in the next to the last stanza she speaks of herself as bodily. In effect, the master disappears, his story, the prior narrative, eclipsed by the difference rendered as the gun's increasing embodiment.To foe of His -- I'm deadly foe --None stir the second time --On whom I lay a Yellow Eye --Or an emphatic Thumb --Again, as was the case in "I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died," the narrative frame is broken by the bodily frame of experience.The object of the story becomes a subject at the same time it comes to perceive itself as bodily.

Given this reading of the poem, the ambiguity of the ending, "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 -- " (like "to see to see") represents the difficulty and relative success Dickinson has in creating a text that will preserve a relationship of equality between herself and her reader, imaged in the exchange between the gun and the mountain within the poem. Dickinson is using a text to free herself from the restrictive and destructive freedom of the Christian narrative frame. We, her readers, come upon her poem as a prior text, which we may read as our master story because it is prior. The danger of inventing a new relationship between writer and reader is suggested in the figures of the gun and the mountain. They are both images of potential violence, and their unchecked pleasure or power, if we take the allusion to the volcano Vesuvias literally, would ultimately be desructive of life. In other words, there is a danger in escaping one form of identity only to become mastered by another. In our desire for identity we bring the words we read, whether those of the Bible or Dickinson's poem, to life. The words that liberate us in turn become the limits of identity. Dickinson's works demonstrate that the only way to prevent oneself from being "framed" by language is to keep writing one's way out.from "Breaking the Eschatological Frame: Dickinson's Narrative Acts."Emily Dickinson JournalVol. 1, No. 1 1992. Online source:http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/I.1.Yukman.htmlEmily Dickinson's'My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun-': Revealing the Power of a Woman's WordsByKathleen E. Gilligan2011, Vol. 3 No. 09 | pg. 1/1CiteReferencesPrintKEYWORDS:Keywords:PoetryEmily DickinsonAmerican PoetryFeminismGender RolesBorn in 1830 to Calvinist parents in Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson is renowned as one of Americas greatest poets. Though her poems often focused on death, she in fact wrote on many subjects. Life, nature, love, science, heaven, hell,religion, writing, and longing are just a few of the topics she explored. In many cases her poems seems to have a straightforward message spelled out so that even those who are unfamiliar withpoetryare able to see her meaning.At other times, Dickinsons poetry can seem confusing or strange to even the most careful reader. In such instances it is necessary to sift through the clues she leaves in her words in order to decipher the hidden meaning. Her seemingly random capitalization, lack of punctuation or obsession with dashes, and incorrect use of grammar were all done deliberately, sometimes to highlight the message that would have otherwise gone unheeded. One such poem which has multiple meanings is My Life had stooda Loaded Gun. To the average reader, Emily Dickinsons My Life had stooda Loaded Gun personifies a gun, but several metaphorical clues lead to a second meaning and message: a woman and her words have great power.Throughout her work, one can see that Dickinson does not seem to care about what is socially accepted. She does not shy away from subjects like religion and/or heaven and hell, which could be considered the most controversial of the time and which other authors and poets (and women in particular) may have avoided for that reason. In her poems, instead of trying to hide her dislike of organized religion, she did the opposite and flaunted her views. Some keep the Sabbath going to church and Im cededIve stopped being Theirs are perfect examples of this. All the same, some of her poems do contain hidden meanings which arent necessarily obvious.Emily Dickinson(1830 - 1886) was an American poet whose work became known only posthumously. Her poetry is recognized today for its non-standard form and often unusual syntax. Image: artistic rendering of Emily Dickinson byLisa Perrin.Emily Dickinson rarely published her poems but it was not because she was afraid of criticism, rather that she was unhappy with the editing that her poems went through by those to whom she sent them. If she was not afraid of criticism, it is likely she simply enjoyed creating poems with double meanings. My Life had stooda Loaded Gun, written in alternating lines of iambic trimeter and tetrameter and with stanza rhymes of either abcb or abcd, is all the more interesting for its two meanings.The first line immediately includes a caesura and sets the stage for the literal meaning of the six stanza poem (1). My Life is the subject of the line, and subsequently becomes the subject of the poem (1). Yet the narrator or persona of the poem is actually the gun, as indicated after the enjambment of the second line: The Owner passedidentified/ And carried Me away (3-4). The Me is the gun (4). To paraphrase, the gun stayed in the corner until its owner came and took it.On the other hand, if one looks deeper into these lines, a connection can be made to a woman and her words. The My Life becomes a womans life, while the Loaded Gun indicates the potential power and danger that a woman has. All four words are capitalized, and though Loaded has one more syllable, in the line they almost become parallel or equivalent to each other. The woman has stood In Corners until her Owner, or husband, identified or chose her and carried her away (2-4). Dickinson is saying that women are powerful, but are the tools of men and often have no choice other than to wait formarriage.The second stanza tells what the personified gun does. Dickinson uses anaphora in the beginning lines to stress the change that has occurred. We refers to the gun and its owner, plainly stating that they roam in Sovreign Woods and hunt the Doe, or go through the woods and hunt deer (5-6). The enjambed every time I speak for Him refers to when the gun is shot, and The Mountains straight reply is the sound of the shot hitting off the mountains and returning (echoing) back to the gun and its owner (7-8). This meaning is obvious, despite the figurativelanguageabout the mountains echoing. As for the second meaning about a womans words, there are some large clues in this stanza. Sovreign often indicates one with supreme power and authority, and in this case refers to men (5).The We roam in Sovreign Woods refers to the husband and wife being in mans world (5). The We hunt the Doe was carefully worded by Dickinson (6). Doe could as easily have been replaced with deer or buck, but it was the female of the species that was chosen (6). This line means that females are killed in the world of men, or the power of the female is killed. The men cannot allow the females to get too powerful. When the female does speak for Him, The Mountains straight reply (7-8). Dickinson is saying that when a woman makes a decision that is normally a mans or ventures to write something (venturing into the territory men believe belongs to them), she gets nowhere. One could read these lines as either the womans way is blocked by a wall (Mountains), or that she is instantly met with criticism (straight reply) (8).The two interpretations continue into the third stanza. The smile and light that Upon the Valley glow indicate the guns spark and flash as it goes off (9-10). It is as a Vesuvian face/ Had let its pleasure through compares the spark and flash to a sudden and violent outburst like Vesuvius erupting (11-12). The meaning of the stanza changes if the persona is a woman. The smile and cordial light could be the polite mask a woman must wear in a mans world, or even the lovely appearance of her poetry (9). The Vesuvian face letting its pleasure through- however, may be a reference to a woman exploding through writing and letting her words through (11-12). A vesuvian was also known as a slow burning match that was used to light cigars, and Dickinson could have meant to indicate that the power of a womans words, once released, do not easily fade (vesuvian).Returning to the guns story, the fourth stanza tells of what the gun does at the end of the day. Dickinson uses alliteration more in this stanza than anywhere else in the poem, with Day done, My Masters, and Ducks Deep using repeated sounds. In the first line of this stanza, Dickinson also plays around with language and structure by using both Night and Day (13). I guard my Masters Head/ Tis better than the Eider Ducks/ Deep Pillowto have shared refers to the guns placement at night (14-16).The gun is above its Masters Head, perhaps on the wall, and believes that is a better place to be as opposed to the Eider Ducks pillow they could have shared (14-16). The alternate meaning shows that the womans husband is also her Master (14). Tis better than the Eider Ducks/ Deep Pillowto have shared, means the woman is turning away from the softness of feminine life, and perhaps even from sharing a bed with her husband (15-16).To foe of HisIm deadly foe/ None stir the second time is straightforward when one believes the gun is the speaker (17-18). The gun protects its owner from any foe (17). Nobody gets up a second time because they are dead (18). Why are they dead? Because the gun has laid a Yellow Eye, which is the spark as the gun fires and perhaps the bullet itself, and an emphatic Thumb, or the finger that pulls back the hammer on the gun to allow it to shoot (19-20). In the alternative meaning of this stanza, the woman declares To foe of HisIm deadly foe (17).The dash is in the middle of the line, which twists the meaning. Instead of meaning that the woman is deadly To foe of His, it is as if she means that To foe of His and everybody else Im deadly foe (17). Shes deadly due to the power her words carry, and once used as a weapon, None stir the second time (18). The Yellow Eye could refer to a jaundiced eye, where something is looked at with a negative or critical view (19). The emphatic Thumb could mean making a decision about something (thumbs up or thumbs down) and expressing view forcibly (20). Together the Yellow Eye and emphatic Thumb, or the womans critical words about something, are unstoppable.The final stanza, though of a different tone than the rest of the piece, continues on with dual meanings. Dickinson uses alliteration as the gun states that it may longer live, with it seemingly distraught about its longevity and insists that He longer mustthan I, or that his owner must live longer (21-22). The gun seems to long for the death that will eventually come to the owner, but will never get because it is not human. In the final two lines the gun almost expresses its disgust for what has been its job, and once again there is a hint of longing for what it will never have: For I have but the power to kill,/ Withoutthe power to die (23-24).When it comes down to it, the gun was just a tool to be used by its owner and will never be able to find the peace its owner will. The meaning concerning a woman in this stanza of Dickinsons poem is a bit different. The Though I than Hemay longer live/ He longer mustthan I means that she realizes it is possible for her to live longer, but he physically must live longer than she will (21-22).This is because she has the power to kill,/ Withoutthe power to die, meaning that her words and poetry have the power to kill (or fight or argue) and cannot end or be taken back once she puts them out there; therefore because her words will be immortal, it is necessary for men to live longer than she physically has, so that her words will continuously be around them (23-24).Poetry rarely means what it appears to mean. Often, there is a hidden or double meaning in the seemingly innocent words that are presented to an audience. The perfect place to hide anything is in plain sight, whether it is a forbidden object or a taboo subject matter. As discussed above, Dickinson did not have any problem tackling tough topics like heaven, hell, or religion, and so poems did not contain hidden meanings because she was afraid of criticism.Rather, it was likely due to Dickinson simply enjoying the experience of layering meanings on top of each other. Her poems can be likened to archeological digs. On the surface there is one layer, but dig a little deeper and another layer is found. In the case of My Life had stooda Loaded Gun, the surface meaning is about a personified gun, but delve a little deeper into the text and Dickinsons views on women and poetry are, perhaps, revealed: a woman and her words are not only powerful, but in a mans world will stand the test of time.This poem is an extended metaphor, in which the speakers life becomes a loaded gun, as defined in the first line. The gun is unused for the first stanza, until its owner recognizes it and takes it away with him. In the second stanza, the gun and the owner become closely connected, traveling together through the woods in pursuit of the deer they are hunting.Whenever the gun is fired (And every time I speak for him ), its boom is echoed by the mountainstheir straight reply. Similarly, when the gun is fired (And do I smile) there is an explosion of light (such cordial light/Upon the Valley glow ), which illuminates the valley (It is as a Vesuvian face/Had let its pleasure through).When the owner goes to sleep (And when at Night Our good Day done ), he has his gun by his bedside to protect him (I guard My Masters Head ), and the gun prefers this role to sleeping with the master (Tis better than the Edier-Ducks/Deep Pillow to have shared ). The gun warns that to any enemy of his masters, he will prove to be very dangerous (To foe of His Im deadly foe ). No one who he is fired at, that is, who sees his explosion (On whom I lay a Yellow eye ) or who is on the wrong end when he cocks the gun (Or an emphatic Thumb ), will survive (None stir the second time ).The gun will live longer than his master (Though I than He may longer live), but it is not true living, because he is Without the power to die . It is death which defines life, thus though he may last longer than his master, his master in the true meaning of the word will outlive himHe longer must than I .AnalysisThere are two conventional understandings of the metaphor of this poem. The first is that the Master is God, and so, picked up by God, the speaker becomes his marksman. She is his staunch defender, and in fulfilling this role, becomes powerfulshe shares his voice, acts only at his bidding, and is in some way immortal. In this reading, then, choosing to serve God is a way to further your own power and existence.The second conventional reading is that the Master is not God, but a lover. The speaker only gains agency or power when she is identified by this lover, and carried away by him. In the second stanza they are fused; they are We, she becomes his voice and guardian. Her guarding of him, however, is fierce, fueled by a murderous and possessive fury to such an extent that, though a bed is mentioned, it is not a sexual place but one of violence, where she guards him jealously. She in fact explicitly states that she would rather guard him than share the bed with him.In either case, whether the Master is deity or lover, the central dilemma of the poem is that of the fusion of the gun and its owner, the force and the agent, the violence and the perpetrator. This becomes very clear in the second stanza, where the speaker and her owner fuse together into a We, and this is emphasized further by the anaphora of the first two lines of that stanza. In addition, the gun, in going off, is communicating for the masterevery time I speak for Him taking on his voice.In the fifth stanza, too, the speaker and the owner are almost indistinguishablethe Yellow Eye, a very human feature, actually refers to the guns explosions, and the sentence grammatically reads On whom I layan emphatic Thumb, but the thumb is clearly actually that of the owner, who is cocking the gun. The poems final stanza makes the two entities distinct again, although it ultimately fuses them in tying their lives and deaths together, and in making this interdependence complicated enough that it is nearly impossible to extricate one from the other.This poem, like so many of Dickinsons, deals with the theme of death, but here, unusually, it is not death that is powerful, but the ability to die. This shows how intricately life and death are tied up, and how life cannot exist without death, for while the gun may longer live than the human master, it never really lives at all Without the power to die . How closely this last stanza ties everything together is made clear in the abundant repetition within itlonger, the power to, than, He, and I.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes (372)BYEMILY DICKINSONAfter great pain, a formal feeling comes The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round A Wooden wayOf Ground, or Air, or Ought Regardless grown,A Quartz contentment, like a stone

This is the Hour of Lead Remembered, if outlived,As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow First Chill then Stupor then the letting go SummaryThe speaker notes that following great pain, a formal feeling often sets in, during which the Nerves are solemn and ceremonious, like Tombs. The heart questions whether it ever really endured such pain and whether it was really so recent (The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, / And Yesterday, or Centuries before?). The feet continue to plod mechanically, with a wooden way, and the heart feels a stone-like contentment. This, the speaker says, is the Hour of Lead, and if the person experiencing it survives this Hour, he or she will remember it in the same way that Freezing persons remember the snow: FirstChillthen Stuporthen the letting go.FormAfter great pain is structurally looser than most Dickinson poems: The iambic meter fades in places; line-length ranges from dimeter to pentameter; the rhyme scheme is haphazard and mostly utilizes couplets (stanza-by-stanza, it is AABB CDEFF GHII); and the middle stanza is five lines long, rather than Dickinsons typical four. Like most other Dickinson poems, however, it uses the long rhythmic dash to indicate short pauses.CommentaryPerhaps Emily Dickinsons greatest achievement as a poet is the record she left of her own inwardness; because of her extraordinary powers of self-observation and her extraordinary willingness to map her own feelings as accurately and honestly as she could, Dickinson has bequeathed us a multitude of hard, intense, and subtle poems, detailing complicated feelings rarely described by other poets. And yet, encountering these feelings in the compression chamber of a Dickinson poem, one recognizes them instantly. After great pain, a formal feeling comes describes the fragile emotional equilibrium that settles heavily over a survivor of recent trauma or profound grief.Dickinsons descriptive words lend a funereal feel to the poem: The emotion following pain is formal, ones nerves feel like Tombs, ones heart is stiff and disbelieving. The feets Wooden way evokes a wooden casket, and the final like a stone recalls a headstone. The speaker emphasizes the fragile state of a person experiencing the formal feeling by never referring to such people as whole human beings, detailing their bodies in objectified fragments (The stiff Heart, The Feet, mechanical, etc.).On 341 ("After great pain, a formal feeling comes--")

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren["After great pain, a formal feeling comes"] is obviously an attempt to communicate to the reader the nature of the experience which comes "after great pain." The poet is using the imagery for this purpose, and the first line of the poem, which states the subject of the poem, is the only abstract statement in the poem. The pain is obviously not a physical pain; it is some great sorrow or mental pain which leaves the mind numbed. The nerves, she says, "sit ceremonious like tombs." The word sit is very important here. The nerves, it is implied, are like a group of people after a funeral sitting in the parlor in a formal hush. Then the poet changes the image slightly by adding "like tombs." The nerves are thus compared to two different things, but each of the comparisons contributes to the same effect, and indeed are closely related: people dressed in black sitting around a room after a funeral may be said to be like tombs. And why does the reference to "tombs " seem such a good symbol for a person who has just suffered great pain (whether it be a real person or the nerves of such a person personified)? Because a tomb has to a supreme degree the qualities of deadness (quietness, stillness) and of formality (ceremony, stiffness).Notice that the imagery (through the first line of the last stanza) is characterized by the possession of a common quality, the quality of stiff lifelessness. For instance, the heart is "stiff," the feet walk a "wooden" way, the contentment is a "quartz" contentment, the hour is that of "lead." The insistence on this type of imagery is very important in confirming the sense of numbed consciousness which is made more explicit by the statement that the feet move mechanically and are "regardless" of where they go. Notice too that the lines are bound together, not only by the constant reference of the imagery to the result of grief, but also by the fact that the poet is stating in series what happens to the parts of the body: nerves, heart, feet.Two special passages in the first two stanzas deserve additional /469/ comment before we pass on to the third stanza. The capital letter in the wordHetells us that Christ is meant. The heart, obsessed with pain and having lost the sense of time and place, asks whether it was Christ who bore the cross. The question is abrupt and elliptic as though uttered at a moment of pain. And the heart asks whether it is not experiencing His pain, andhaving lost hold of the real worldwhether the crucifixion took place yesterday or centuries before. And behind these questions lies the implication that pain is a constant part of the human lot. The implied figure of a funeral makes the heart's question about the crucifixion come as an appropriate one, and the quality of the suffering makes the connection implied between its own sufferings and that on the cross not violently farfetched.The line, "A quartz contentment like a stone," is particularly interesting. The comparison involves two things. First, we see an extension of the common association of stoniness with the numbness of grief, as in such phrases as "stony-eyed" or "heart like a stone," etc. But why does the poet use "quartz"? There are several reasons. The name of the stone helps to particularize the figure and prevent the effect of a clich. Moreover, quartz is a very hard stone. And, for one who knows that quartz is a crystal, a "quartz contentment" is a contentment crystallized, as it were, out of the pain. This brings us to the second general aspect involved by the comparison. This aspect is ironical. The contentment arising after the shock of great pain is a contentment because of the inability to respond any longer, rather than the ability to respond satisfactorily and agreeably.To summarize for a moment, the poet has developed an effect of inanimate lifelessness, a stony, or wooden, or leaden stiffness; now, she proceeds to use a new figure, that of the freezing person, which epitomizes the effect of those which have preceded it, but which also gives a fresh and powerful statement.The line, "Remembered if outlived," is particularly forceful. The implication is that few outlive the experience to be able to remember and recount it to others. This experience of grief is like a death by freezing: there is the chill, then the stupor as the body becomes numbed, and then the last state in which the body finally gives up the fight against the cold, and relaxes and /470/ dies. The correspondence of the stages of death by freezing to the effect of the shock of deep grief on the mind is close enough to make the passage very powerful. But there is another reason for the effect which this last figure has on us. The imagery of the first two stanzas corresponds to the "stupor." The last line carries a new twist of idea, one which supplies a context for the preceding imagery and which by explaining it, makes it more meaningful. The formality, the stiffness, the numbness of the first two stanzas is accounted for: it is an attempt to hold in, the fight of the mind against letting go; it is a defense of the mind. /471/THOMAS H. JOHNSON. . . The authority of "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" derives from the technical skill with which the language is controlled. As she always does in her best poems, Emily Dickinson makes her first line lock all succeeding lines into position. . . . /97/ The heaviness of the pain is echoed bybore, wooden, quartz, stone, lead. The formal feeling is coldly ceremonious, mechanical, and stiff, leading through chill and stupor to a "letting go." The stately pentameter measure of the first stanza is used, in the second, only in the first line and the last, between which are hastened rhythms. The final two lines of the poem, which bring it to a close, reestablish the formality of the opening lines. Exact rhymes conclude each of the stanzas.Emily Dickinson's impulse to let the outer form develop from the inner mood now begins to extend to new freedoms. Among her poems composed basically as quatrains, she does not hesitate to include a three-line stanza, as in "I rose because he sank," or a five-line stanza, as in "Glee, the great storm is over." On some occasions, to break the regularity in yet another way or to gain a new kind of emphasis, she splits a line from its stanza, allowing it to stand apart, as in "Beautybe not causedlt Is," and "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House." Sometimes poems beginning with an iambic beat shift in succeeding stanzas to a trochaic, to hasten the tempo, as in "In falling timbers buried." It is the year too when she used her dashes lavishly. /98/FRANCIS MANLEYBetween 1860 and 1862 Emily Dickinson is commonly believed to have experienced a psychic catastrophe, which drove her into poetry instead of out of her mind. According to her explanation, she was haunted by some mysterious fright, and her fear, or whatever it was, opened the floodgates of her poetry. But despite their overwhelming number, the poems she produced under these conditions are not an amorphous overflow from a distraught mind; they are informed and well-wrought, the creations of controlled artistryespecially about twenty-five or thirty poems which, unlike the rest, treat specifically the intense subtleties of mental anguish, anatomizing them with awesome precision. And since all of the poems in this small cluster deal with varied aspects of that one subject, all of them follow a certain basic pattern dictated by the abstract nature of pain.In each of these poems Dickinson was faced with this initial problem: somehow she had to describe a formless, internal entity which could never be revealed to others except in terms of its outward signs and manifestations. Moreover, these externalizations did not always /260/ correspond to the internal condition but at times, in fact, represented the exact opposite. Yet in poetry if such signs were completely misleading, they would obviously defeat their own purpose by communicating the wrong thing. Consequently, they must offer some oblique means for the reader to penetrate appearances to the reality beneath. In solving this problem Dickinson created some of her most interesting and complex poetry. Generally speaking, irony was her weapon as well as her strategy. First, she usually set up for her persona some sort of external ritual or drama, which contains various levels of calm objectivity. Then, through a series of ironic involutions generated in the course of this symbolic action, she eventually led the reader from appearances to the reality of a silent anguish made more terrifying by its ironic presentation, as [in "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"]. . . .In a literal sense, this poem has neither persona nor ritual, and since it describes a state of mind, neither would seem to be necessary. In such a case attention should be centered on the feeling itself and secondarily on its location. Consequently Dickinson personified various parts of the body so as to demonstrate the action of numbness on themthenerves,theheart,thefeetgeneralized entities belonging to no one. Yet that is precisely the formal feeling benumbed contentment produces in a person, especially one who has lost the sense of time and his own identity (lines 3-4). All the parts of his body seem to be autonomous beings moving in mysterious ways. If that constitutes a persona, it is necessarily an unobtrusive one that must be reconstructed fromdisjecta membra. Similarly, the /261/ various actions performed in this poem are disjunctive, and though vaguely related to a chaotic travesty of a funeral, they are not patterned by any consistent, overall ceremony. Since they are all external manifestations or metaphors for numbness, however, they are all as they should be, lifeless forms enacted in a trance as though they were part of some meaningless rite.The first stanza, for instance, is held rigid by the ceremonious formality of the chamber of death when, after the great pain of its passing, the corpse lies tranquil and composed, surrounded by mourners hushed in awe so silent that time seems to have gone off into eternity "Yesterday, or Centuries before." In one respect this metaphor is particularly suitable since the nerves are situated round about the body or the "stiff Heart" like mourners about the bed of death. But if the metaphor is extended further, it seems to become ludicrously unsuitable. These nerves, for example, are not neighbors lamenting with their silent presence the death of a friend. They are sensation itself, but here they are dead, as ceremonious and lifeless as tombs. Consequently, the formal feeling that comes after great pain is, ironically, no feeling at all, only benumbed rigidness. Conversely, if the "stiff Heart" is the corpse, he nevertheless has life or consciousness enough to question whether it was "He, that bore, / And Yesterday, or Centuries before." Obviously, this is moving toward artistic chaos since metaphors should be more and more applicable the further they are extended, but this one apparently becomes progressively worse. Curiously, however, by breaking all the rules Dickinson achieved the exact effect she needed. Her problem was to describe an essentially paradoxical state of mind in which one is alive but yet numb to life, both a living organism and a frozen form. Consequently she took both terms of this paradox and made each a reversed reflection of the other. Although the mourners, the nerves, appear to be the living, they are in actuality the dead, and conversely the stiff heart, the metaphoric corpse, has ironically at least a semblance of consciousness. In their totality, both these forms of living death define the "stop sensation" that comes after great pain.Since the metaphoric nightmare of the first stanza could hardly be extended any further, Dickinson is obviously not concerned with elaborating a conceit. In the second stanza, then, the cataleptically formal rites of the dead are replaced by a different sort pf action ceremoniously performed in a trance, an extension not of the previous metaphor, but of the paradox which informed it. For although move- /262/ ment usually indicates vitality, there is no life in the aimless circles of the walking dead. Whether numb feet go on the hardness of ground or on the softness of air, their way is wooden because paralysis is within them. Since they cannot feel nor know nor even care where they are going ("Regardless grown"), they wander in circles ("go round") on an insane treadmill as though lost, suspended between life and death and sharing the attributes of both.The third stanza is, in one respect, an imagistic repetition of the second. Benumbed, aimless movements through a world of waste, the motions of the living dead are similar to the trance-like, enchanted steps of persons freezing in a blank and silent world of muffling snow. But at the same time that this metaphor refers particularly to the preceding stanza, it also summarizes the entire poem since the ambiguous antecedent ofThisin line 10 is, in one respect, everything that went before. Consequently, this final image should somehow fuse all the essential elements of the poem. Not only that, it should present them in sharp focus.Certainly the chill and subsequent stupor of freezing, a gradual numbing of the senses, incorporates many of the attributes of death itself: a loss of vital warmth, of locomotion, of a sense of identity in time and space conjoined with an increasing coolness, rigidness, and apathy. Since freezing, however, is neither life nor death but both simultaneously, it is an excellent, expansive metaphor for the living death which comes after great pain. But in addition to extending the basic paradox which informs the poem, this final figure serves a more important function by drawing to the surface and presenting in full ambivalence a certain ironic ambiguity which in the first two stanzas remains somewhat below the threshold of conscious awareness.In its furthest extent great pain produces internal paralysis, but, ironically, this numbness is not itself a pain. It is no feeling, "an element of blank," which gradually emerges from the poem until at the end it almost engulfs it in white helplessness. In the first stanza it lurks just below the surface, unstated, but ironically present in the situation itself. For although the nerves represent metaphorically the formal feeling which comes after great pain by being silent, ceremonious mourners, they are simultaneously dead sensation, no feeling, formal or otherwise, not pain, but nothing. In the second stanza this implication is no longer subliminal, but even though it is at the surface, it is not developed, merely stated: "A Quartz /263/ contentment, like a stone." According to Webster'sAmerican Dictionary(1851), the lexicon Dickinson used, contentment was a "Rest or quietness of mind in the present condition; satisfaction which holds the mind in peace, restraining complaint, opposition, or further desire, and often implying a moderate degree of happiness." Apparently, then, by the second stanza anguish has resolved itself into its impossible opposite, a hard, cold, quartz-like peaceful satisfaction of the mind. In the third stanza, this inert irony fully emerges to modify response and ultimately to qualify it to such an extent that the poem ends in tense, unresolved ambivalence. According to the superficial movement of the poem, the time after great pain will later be remembered as a period of living death similar to the sensation of freezing. Yet the qualifications attached to that statement drain it of its assertiveness and curiously force it to imply its own negative. For there is not only a doubt that this hour of crisis may not be outlived (line 11), but even the positive statement (that it will be remembered) is made fully ambivalent by being modified by its own negative (that it will be remembered just as freezing persons recollect the snow). Ironically, freezing persons can never remember the snow since they die in it, destroyed by a warm, contented numbness in which they sleep and perish in entranced delusion. Because there is no solution to this ambivalence, the poem ends unresolved, suspended between life and death in a quartz contentment, the most deadly anguish of all, the very essence of pain, which is not pain, but a blank peace, just as the essence of sound is silence. /264/CHARLES R. ANDERSON[In "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," the] three stanzas faintly shadow forth three stages of a familiar ceremony: the formal service, the tread of pallbearers, and the final lowering into a grave. But metaphor is subdued to meaning by subtle controls. . . . /210/ This poem has recently received the explication it deserves, matching its excellence. But its pertinence to this whole group of poems is such as to justify a brief summary of the interpretation here.'In a literal sense,' according to this critic, there is 'neither persona nor ritual, and since it describes a state of mind, neither would seem to be necessary.' Instead, as befits one who has lost all sense of identity, the various parts of the body are personified as autonomous entities (thenerves,theheart,thefeet), belonging to no one and moving through the acts of a meaningless ceremony, lifeless forms enacted in a trance. As a result, attention is centered on the feeling itself and not on the pattern of figures that dramatize it. As the images of a funeral rite subside, two related ones emerge to body forth the victim who is at once a living organism and a frozen form. Both are symbols of crystallization: 'Freezing' in the snow, which is neither life nor death but both simultaneously; and A Quartz contentment, like a stone,' for the paradoxical serenity that follows intense suffering. This recalls her envy of the 'little Stone,' happy because unconscious of the exigencies that afflict mortals, and points forward to the paradox in another poem, 'Contented as despair.' Such is the 'formal feeling' that comes after great pain. It is, ironically, no feeling at all, only numb rigidness existing outside time and space. /211/

Sharon Cameron"Great pain" is the predicate on which the sentence of fixity lies, the prior experience against which feeling hardens in intransigent difference. The relationship between the adjective in "formal feeling," the adverb in "The Nerves sit ceremonious," and the simile, "like Tombs" is a relationship of progressive clarity; the connections get made in the underground touching of the roots of each of these words; the "formal feeling," "ceremonious," is a feeling of death. And as if in parody of the initial image, in the next line the "Heart" too is a "stiff," unable to connect self to incident or to date.Like the "Element of Blank," like the "Trance" that covers pain, and like the "nearness to Tremendousness / An Agony procures," the "formal feeling" is an abdication of presence, a fact that explains why the question the speaker puts to herself is framed by incredulity and designates the subject as someone else, a "He, that bore," why the time that precedes the present becomes mere undifferentiated space, "Yesterday, or Centuries before?" But unlike "Blank," "Trance," and "a nearness to Tremendousness," the "formal feeling" is an anatomy of pain's aftermath from a distance, a self standing outside of the otherness that possesses it. Thus we are told of the parts of the body as if they were someone else's or no one's: "The Heart . . . the Nerves . . . the Feet . . . "; thus we are shown actions, how the body looks, what it does, rather than feelings. Thus the speaker arrives at a definition ("This is the Hour of Lead") divorced from the experience because encompassing it. Thus the concluding simile departs from the present as if in analogy there were some further, final escape.But although the initial images follow upon each other like a death, the second stanza makes clear that death is only an analogy for the body that has lost its spirit, for the vacancy of will. Given its absence, all action is repetition of movement without meaning, and as if to emphasize the attendant vacuousness, the lines repeat each other: "The Feet" "go round" in circles, "Wooden," "Regardless grown," until the stanza's final line boldly flaunts its own redundancy. "A Quartz contentment " is "like a stone" because quartz is a stone. However, perhaps Dickinson means us to see two images here, the transparent crystal and the grey stone to which it clouds, in a synesthesia that would equate the darkening of color with a formal hardening. As in "perfectparalyzing Bliss / Contented as Despair," contentment here is the ultimate quiet, the stasis that resembles death. "Wood," "stone," "Lead"the images to this point have been ones of progressive hardening. The image with which the poem concludes, however, is more complex because of its susceptibility to transformation, its capacity to exist as ice, snow, and finally as the melting that reduces these crystals to water. The poem's last line is an undoing of the spell of stasis. Because it is not another, different expression of hardness but implies a definite progression away from it by retracing the steps that comprise its history, we know that the "letting go" is not a letting go of life, is not death, but is rather the more colloquial "letting go" of feeling, an unleashing of the ability to experience it again. To connect the stages of the analogy to the stages of the poem: "Chill" precedes the poem, "Stupor" preoccupies it, and "the letting go" exists on the far side of its ending. The process whereby blankness has been called into existence, given palpable form, dimension, character and movement enables the poem to specify what the previous poems on pain merely note. Dickinson's poems mostly take place "After great pain," in the space between "Chill" and "Stupor." "Life [is] so very sweet at the Crisp," she wrote longingly, "what must it be unfrozen! " (L 472). But the conversion of the body into stone was not lasting. She was not, as she sometimes seemed to declare herself, numb from the neck down. Pain was the shot that inflicted temporary paralysis, a remedy that worked until the poems took over. Then she could spell out the words she swore consciousness refused her, "letting [the feeling] go" into them where from a distance she could look.We saw earlier how, in Derridas terms, pain is a trace of lost presence, the record of its having been. Thus Dickinson's speakers "learn the Transport by the Pain," sometimes seeming to harbor the belief that "Pain-" is "the Transport" it stands for. Pain is with us as a presence because pain stands for (in place of) presence. But pain, as we have seen in the last few pages, is also the past after which, from which, comes the "formal feeling" that is the poem. If we were to arrange the three terms in a sequence (present/ce, pain, and poem) they would, each one, hark back to a past that eluded all efforts to retain it. For the first temporal principle is one of alterity, the present differing from the past and the future from the present. We then have some idea of why Dickinson claimed in her meeting with Higginson not to have learned how to tell time until she was fifteen. For to tell time is to tell difference, to note the failure of resemblance ever to be the same as that from which it differs. Dickinsons poems on pain are an attempt to blank time out and to create, in its place, a space where the temporal apparatus of daily life has been as if disconnected. For presence is past, and even what follows presence (what Poulet calls the moment after loss) lies behind us. In the sequence of diminishing returns, what has been is, by definition, missing. What remains is a true blank, the genuine space at the thought of which despair "raves," and around which words gather in the mourning that is language.fromLyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Copyright 1979 by The Johns Hopkins UP.

Kamilla DenmanWhile Dickinson did not go so far as to make words mean their logical opposite, she did disrupt conventional arrangements to create emotional and psychological effects, as in the lines of "The Snake" above. A more extended example of this process appears in poem 341 . . . .Temporal dislocation in the content of the poem is integrally related to its syntactic and metrical form. generally, the order of words in temporal sequence establishes linguistic relationships from which meanings emerge. In this poem, the temporal disruption of the speaker's psyche extends to the syntax and meter, with incomplete sentences and sudden shifts from pentameter to tetrameter to trimeter to dimeter and back. Other phrases in the poem initially seem to form complete sentences but then unravel in subsequent lines that confuse the original meaning, as in the last stanza. There are no periods to mark off any thought as complete, nor even to mark the poem as a complete thought: the final sentence is completely fragmented by dashes. Alan Helms, in his incisive reading of the punctuation in this poem, says that the dashes in the last line approximate the experience of freezing by slowing down the tempo. The final verb, "letting go," is followed by a dash that hangs the poem and the experience described in the poem over a visual and aural precipice of frozen silence. Were the sentences to be made complete and the poem conventionally punctuated, the essence of the experience it describes would be lost. Clearly, much of Dickinsons power in evoking psychological states lies in her disrega