'The Gun', Vicki Feaver

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Vicki Feaver, 'The Gun'

The speaker's partner brings a shotgun into the house. It is initially described as resting ominously on a table. It is then used for target practice before being used to kill animals. The gun seems to have electrifying effects on the house as the speaker and her partner fest on the animals they have shot. the poem concludes with the speaker comparing the exciting feast to the arrival of a pagan King of Death.

Commentary- This poem positions itself against liberal attitudes towards guns and hunting, which perceives guns as dangerous and fearful instruments of violence and death. Feaver is in accordance with this liberal view in her initial response in the first and second stanzas of her poem; however, she concludes that a gun can have an electrifying impact- the thrill of the hunt and the pleasure of the subsequent feasting. A gun can bring an intensity, excitement and ultimately a celebration of life, despite life's fragility. the poem is therefore structured along these lines- the initial fear and disruption a gun brings, following by delightful relish.

The impact of the gun is established by Feaver's use of form in the opening couplet:

"Bringing a gun into a house

change it"

The first line holds in tension the contrast between a gun and a house. The line breaks suggest that the house has been disrupted by the gun. The line break creates a pause- a hesitancy- before the revelation of the second line. Our eye is therefore drawn towards the verb 'changes'; this is indeed a poem about change, the movement from fearful apprehension towards a primitive ecstasy.

The imagery in the second stanza continues the dynamic tension between the gun and the house. Feaver has said that the poem is based on the experience of her husband bringing home a shotgun for the first time after moving to a very rural part of the country. The gun is already infused with a sexual symbolism as the husband lays it on the table, the phallus-like 'polished wood stock/jutting over the edge'. In the simile 'like something dead', Feaver is, at this point in the poem, contrasting the gun with 'grey' contrasts with the 'green-checked cloth' of the ostensibly domestic kitchen table. The gun and to violence develops significantly and an ethical line is crossed:

"Then a rabbit shot

clean through the head."

The poem becomes increasingly sensuous int he fourth stanza: her husband's hands 'reek of gun oil / and entrails' and he tramples the 'fur and feathers' of slaughtered animals into the house. The sensuousness reaches its culmination in the final line of the stanza in the remarkable simile: 'like when sex was fresh', suggesting the gun improves their sex life as it brings youthful vitality and virility. The following, single-line, end-stopped stanza confirms what has been hinted at throughout:

"A gun brings a house alive"

The speaker and her partner's ongoing relish is evinced in the syndetic pairs of -ing verbs in the final stanza as the feast is prepared: 'jointing/ and slicing, stirring and tasting". The poem's exploration of life and death is woven skillfully into the final, rather startling image. The pagan figure of the King of Death is imagined powerfully 'stalking / out of winder woods' to join in the feast. His mouth is 'sprouting golden crocuses'- flowers associated with the life of early spring. The presences of death ultimately make us cherish life because in death we recognise life's fragility.