What do we think/feel about the poem -- "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun"?

 What does this poem seek to communicate? What are supposed to learn from it? 

After re-reading it several times, I'm still left feeling adrift in it, not sure what to make of it. 

I want to share two initial and basic readings that I have, ones that are kind of brash and unsubtle, just so we can start somewhere, and I will also share some related ramblings as well. Maybe what I can offer can spark some conversation that can help me (and us) see deeper into the poem. I think I would be most happy if we could start a dialogue in the comments of this post together. 

My first reading of the poem considers the significance of the image of the speaker as a loaded gun and how it's carried through the rest of the poem. In the first stanza, I see her, as a gun, standing upright in some corner of a room, perhaps unused and forgotten. The "Owner," having passed by her, notices the gun and takes the opportunity to go hunting in the woods. This is picked up in the next stanza, where we have a direct image of the speaker (as gun) and the owner (as hunter) going off into nature to hunt the "Doe" together. Several things come up here for me. Are we supposed to see the Owner as a kind of pioneer of the outdoors, who had just begun a lover affair with a violent object he uses to be with nature? Where he gathers his sustenance, and fills his spirit with nature, and returns home after a good day done? But, what if the "gun" is not a gun at all, but the image of a wife made into a servant for his pleasure? 

Even further, we could go in a completely different direction, and lean into the gun as speaking thing, which I at first take to mean the blasting that sounds upon firing, reverberating across the landscape and echoing in return as a "straight reply." However, I pause to consider why the poet would describe the gun as capable of speech, and as the mountains as capable of reply, as if the two could somehow be in conversation together. An echo wouldn't be a reply so much as it would be the return of one's own voice; the mountains respond, as themselves. And the gun's speech, rather than a literal blast, could be the words of, say, a poem, recited by the "Owner" to the mountains; like some pastoral Whitman in poetic relation to all of nature. The words, like a "loaded-gun", have the potential to be explosive, but until read and felt, mean nothing, where they had been left in the corner of one of a room, forgotten. 

In the next Stanza, the images presented become even more elusive to me. First, taking the gun image: after having been shot off, one could consider it as "smiling" as with a "light" that illuminates the valley with a glow. The Vesuvian face, further makes us imagine the gun as a kind volcano let loose on the landscape. However, how are we to take the light of a blast as "cordial", kind like a smile, and done with pleasure? Who's pleasure are we speaking of? The landscape has become warm and inviting, and the presence of both the smile and pleasure evokes gladness, not the violence nor the destruction of a gun. The mountains, having "straight replied" are responded to with this cordial smile. There is communion here, and the presence of the "Owner" has receded, somehow. Yet, we are not far from the Erotic, either. Is the Owner taking his pleasure with his gun sport? Has a wife let flow her loving tenderness with pleasure on the landscape of her husband? Bathing him in light, not unlike the Sun? A love so powerful it can feel eruptive, a force of to be in awe of, and one that seeks to "guard" protectively? Everything here feels like a dream, where everything blends; and if you look closely enough at one image, it easily shifts into other. Even the image of a glowing valley, I think, is an invitation to see the "Valley of the Shadow of Death" having been filled with some kind of redemptive light.

This is just beginning. Will add more later. What do we think?