Hien Tieu
Dr. Liz Ann Baez Anguilar
ENGL 1302.012
1st October 2015
Lyric Time Dickinson and the Limits of Genre
Cameron, Sharon. “Lyric Time Dickinson and the limits of genre”, library of congress cataloging in publication data. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London. 1979.
(66) I should like to offer two conventional paraphrases of the poem, which I shall then suggest are inadequate. In the first, picked up by God, the speaker becomes His marksman: the mountains resound with the echoes of her shots; those bursts of gunfire are as “cordial” as the eruption of a volcano; with the threat of more gunfire, she guards him at night, imagining her power to be total. Alternatively, if “Owner” is a term that suggests a deity, “Master” …show more content…
The seepage of additional meaning, resonances of more complicate intention, infect the experience of the whole poem so that on the first reading we reject a superficial interpretation – the poem depicts neither the relationship between a man and his gun- nor one between a woman and her God or between a woman and her lover. Meaning bearing down on us and, at the same time, eluding us casts doubt on our ability to identify what we are reading, and this mystification is partly a consequence of the way in which the conceit draws attention to its own transparency. In stanza one, for example, it is unclear whether we are to imagine the speaker as gun or as person, and the revealing taint of human presence continues in stanza two, where the echoes returned by the mountain might as easily be those of a voice as of a gun. Likewise in the third stanza, the speaker’s smile however provisional, conceivably takes place on a human countenance – the Vesuvian face that admits, albeit reluctantly, of pleasure. In the next stanza, the implicit alternatives of sexuality and death are clearly human alternatives. In the next, the human parts of the body are so fused with, and completed by, the parts of the gun, that our attention is drawn to the speaker’s thumb rather than to the hammer it
Dr. Liz Ann Baez Anguilar
ENGL 1302.012
1st October 2015
Lyric Time Dickinson and the Limits of Genre
Cameron, Sharon. “Lyric Time Dickinson and the limits of genre”, library of congress cataloging in publication data. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London. 1979.
(66) I should like to offer two conventional paraphrases of the poem, which I shall then suggest are inadequate. In the first, picked up by God, the speaker becomes His marksman: the mountains resound with the echoes of her shots; those bursts of gunfire are as “cordial” as the eruption of a volcano; with the threat of more gunfire, she guards him at night, imagining her power to be total. Alternatively, if “Owner” is a term that suggests a deity, “Master” …show more content…
The seepage of additional meaning, resonances of more complicate intention, infect the experience of the whole poem so that on the first reading we reject a superficial interpretation – the poem depicts neither the relationship between a man and his gun- nor one between a woman and her God or between a woman and her lover. Meaning bearing down on us and, at the same time, eluding us casts doubt on our ability to identify what we are reading, and this mystification is partly a consequence of the way in which the conceit draws attention to its own transparency. In stanza one, for example, it is unclear whether we are to imagine the speaker as gun or as person, and the revealing taint of human presence continues in stanza two, where the echoes returned by the mountain might as easily be those of a voice as of a gun. Likewise in the third stanza, the speaker’s smile however provisional, conceivably takes place on a human countenance – the Vesuvian face that admits, albeit reluctantly, of pleasure. In the next stanza, the implicit alternatives of sexuality and death are clearly human alternatives. In the next, the human parts of the body are so fused with, and completed by, the parts of the gun, that our attention is drawn to the speaker’s thumb rather than to the hammer it