My life had stood a loaded gun
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 the sov'reign 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 Upon the valley glow— It is as a Vesuvian face Had let its 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 art to kill— Without the power to die.
Of note
Dickinson copied this poem into one of her handmade booklets around 1863, but it went unpublished until 1929, more than four decades after her death. In 2010 biographer Lyndall Gordon borrowed its image for the title of her book Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds.
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TEXT PROVENANCE · First published 1929 in Further Poems of Emily Dickinson · Text from Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (1929), ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, via Wikisource.
Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (1929)
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