Emily Dickinson’s poem, “My Life had Stood-a Loaded Gun,” could best described as impatience and suffocation in the form of restraint. Emily Dickinson draws parallels between her feelings of bondage with a loaded gun, and then establishes her master’s role, or the gunman, and his power over her feelings. It feels a bit incoherent and un-done, but this incoherence adds to anxiety of the poem.

Throughout the poem Emily makes a discrete point as to the nature of a loaded gun; it is anxious. A loaded gun is a tool of man for hunting and protection. A gun is a servant of man in its most delicate sense. How more appropriate is it to have a women feel as a gun or as a servant? Emily implies her feelings of being controlled by a man impressively by creating an image of authority, or being man’s gun.

Towards the middle and end of the poem, Emily begins to send the message that the gun needs emancipation. Perhaps a gun’s pursuit of happiness and its wills lie in the mountains with its “Vesuvius” face, and pleasure-full “glow.” Emily seems to be implying that her happiness may not lie in being this “gun” or servant of man, but instead, she feels her truth lies, although unnatural, in the liberty of her expression and being. She wants to be free.

Towards the end the man sets the gun back in its corner, still loaded so to protect him if he would ever need it, but blesses it no more. Emily ends by declaring that she or the “gun” feels it has the power to kill, but not the power to die, a sense of abdication of will, and feelings of impotence up until the end of the poem.

The essay written “My Life had Stood” by Paula Bennett takes a very feminist approach to the poem, stating that it “perfectly captures the nature, the difficulties, and the risks involved in this task of self-redefinition and self-empowerment” of women. This is the relation between Benetts, essay and this one; they both describe a fine emotion of restraint.

Emily felt bound; her essay clearly tries to deliver a message of “let me free.” Benett understands the type of emotion a woman felt under the pressures of gender based servitude and makes a great case on behalf of Dickinson for feminism.