happiness is a warm gun, maybe dickinson read hegel - Ms. Eustice

 My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —

My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —
In Corners — till a Day
The Owner passed — identified —
And carried Me away —

And now We roam in Sovereign 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 power to kill,
Without — the power to die —

This poem begins and ends with the potential to inflict death. The narrator’s life is a Loaded Gun ready to be carried in the first stanza, and she has the power to kill but not to die in the final lines. She moves and hunts through the Woods, she speaks to Him and the mountains reply, she experiences day and night. She seems to experience a kind of life or at least elements of it that we all do: speech, motion, day and night. The gender of the narrator is not revealed, but let us assume it is a her. 

If we take the narrator literally as a weapon, her voice is the gunshot echoing off the mountains, she guards her Owner, it is better to be owned by Him than it is for creatures to rest as she shares his foes, his empathetic thumb seems to direct her eye, she outlives him—she cannot die. But surely the poem is not merely literal, that is only one dimension of it. Is she more similar to her “Owner” than we may think a gun is, is she human as he is? Did her life feel like a loaded gun, a powerful thing abandoned unnoticed in a corner? It seems like a poem of anger, but much of it is ambiguous. What kind of possession is taking place? Is it a man owning a gun? A woman? Something, perhaps some power or muse owning a poet? Something about the emphasis on possession and being possessed is reminiscent of the master-slave dialectic--perhaps this poem is a journey of two self-consciousnesses striving to recognize each other. It is a struggle unto death and one that could be seen as eternal, as the narrator outlives her possessor. Two enter into a relationship in an attempt to preserve some kind of mutual recognition, which gives them the material for self-consciousness. According to Hegel, one masters the other, yet the lordship or ownership makes the master (or Owner?) incapable of realizing the recognition he seeks, as his slave (Her?) cannot offer it. Perhaps the narrator is more than just the Loaded Gun that her Owner carried away. The slave becomes more than a slave. He creates for the master and gains self-consciousness in seeing himself reflected in his work. The master becomes reliant on the slave--and isn't the Owner relaint on the narrator for hunting and protection and battling foes?

There are destructive effects born of the possession. There is not just the imagery of death, but of pressure and explosion—of a gun firing and the volcano Vesuvian erupting. There is tension between masculine and feminine, but her action through the poem is dimensional. The empathetic Thumb and Yellow Eye could be aiming a muzzle and putting a finger on the trigger in an act of violence, but it could also be creative, or even sexual. The Eye could be literal sight and the empathetic Thumb the creation of poetry, an original thing that cannot be recreated, cannot stir twice. Possessor and possessed seem to be different entities, but not always. The possession merges “Me” or “I” with “Him” to become “We” at points, so the narrator could be both the Owner and the owned. Whatever the case, something about the possessed lives eternal, perhaps a gun outliving a man, perhaps poetry outliving the poet and time in which it was created, perhaps the works and subsequent liberation wrought from being in servitude. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdvnOH060Qg