Hi everyone and welcome to Play This Pages! Today we're talking about The Gun by Vicky Fever. This is another poem on the Edexcel AS level and A level English literature curriculum. Let's dive straight into the summary and then the line by line analysis. Trigger warnings for violence.
The gun from the onset alerts us to the presence of violence. Even not quite knowing what the poem is about, we can already sense that there is danger and killing potentially involved, and this is partly due to our own associations with guns. And I guess this could be different from person to person. depending on how you view guns in general, but I think titling a poem The Gun is deliberately provocative. In the poem a gun is brought into the house and soon enough the house is filled with things that the gun has killed.
And when talking about the poem, Vicky Fever herself said that that it was quite autobiographical because she, much like the reader, was quite fearful of guns before she moved to Scotland, but after her own husband brought a shotgun home, her attitude towards it changed. And the poem explores this shift through themes of conflict, power and gender. A quick note about the structure.
The layout is quite attention grabbing as the lines vary in length, occasionally just one startling line, other times a lengthy seven line reflection. I think this perfectly shows the unevenness and instability of a gun, these sudden bursts of violence. There is no rhyme scheme, but there are occasionally similar sounding words and these consonant rhymes sound wrong and add to the overall discomfort we feel as the reader. Bringing a gun into a house changes it. You lay it on the kitchen table stretched out like something dead.
itself, the grainy polished woodstock jutting over the edge, the long metal barrow casting a grey shadow on the green checked cloth. The enjambment is cleverly used to give this poem a very jarring feel from the onset we don't exude the don't expect this poem to break away so suddenly and in doing so shows very clearly the violence and the change that a gun can rapidly bring because we as the reader are quite uncomfortable with it being brought into our house, well at least most of us are. and this enjambment, this break away from the first line into the next stanza shows us the change quite rapidly. it shows it it shows it to us visually because we can visually see the breaks and it also shows it to us audibly because we cannot help but pause when we see the change and i think that in particular this image is very striking because we have these associations of the home with warms and coziness and comfort and guns, partly due to the media and partly due to the dangerous history that guns are used for, we have these associations of violence and of death and so seeing the gun being brought into the home it seems like a violation and it seems like a taboo topic, like a transgression. So it's uncomfortable for us as the reader.
you lay it on the kitchen table. the pronoun you directly involves us in the story. it makes us feel as if we are the one who broke the comfort of the home and this image of it lying on the kitchen table. vicky never once lets us forget that the gun is a dangerous object. it's almost ironic that the gun is lying there like a dead thing when it is the thing that we use to make others dead, to make others die, right?
so also the image of it stretched out it almost feels as if it's toying with us, as if it's the predator lying calmly stretched out knowing that all the prey around it is easy food essentially. the image also seems quite surreal because we have this gun, this long metal barrel that's described in such precise detail lying on a green checkered cloth. a green checkered cloth something that is cheerful that we associate with picnics and with happiness is quite literally overcast by a gray shadow. it's overtaken by the threat of violence and more than that the gun juts out over the edge. it's not only happy dominating the happiness aspect of the home, it wants to dominate the entire space, it wants to take over somebody's comfort and somebody's coziness, it wants to take over somebody's life.
The short and sudden sounds in the stanza further convey this dominance with the hardened plosive sounds. The speaker essentially tells us there is no comfort here, you should be worried, you should be scared and you should feel uncomfortable. After all, at the beginning I was.
It's also speculated that the gun is actually a phallic symbol, so the relationship described here is a danger. one where the masculine energy completely overpowers the feminine and the woman doesn't get a chance to speak or voice her opinion. At first it's just practice.
Perforating tins, dangling on orange string from trees in the garden, then a rapid shot, clean through the head. So the next stanza is somewhat in the future, time has passed but already we can see just how much the speaker has become desensitized to the violence of the gun. The speaker calmly lets herself be led into practice at first But seemingly a normal line, at first it's just practice, begs the apprehension and the negative energy and the worry of saying it's just practice now, but what's next? Who's being shot? Is it an animal?
Is it a person? Does it even matter? The colon on the end is sinister. It's inevitable. Of course it's not going to be enough to shoot cans anymore.
Soon we need to shoot lifeguards. creatures. And that's what we do with the rabbit. It's shot clean through the head.
And the orange strings on the cans are, well, they act like a warning because orange has traditionally been used to signal something or warn someone or show danger. But the speaker pays no heed. She doesn't distinguish anymore between a can, an inanimate object, and a rabbit, a live one. It doesn't matter.
She has become desensitized to this violence. Also, just orange string and this image of cans hanging in the garden it sounds almost like a pretty decoration it sounds as if you walk by and you see these cans with the holes and you just think oh maybe it's a bird feeder or something of the kind just like a decoration but then you think about it and you realize what it's used for it's used for shooting practice and we see that there's a sinister darker layer beneath the cheery tone because something darker has taken over Something darker is now in control of both the speaker and the atmosphere in which she lives in. It has changed her as a person and it has changed her home.
And the poem is quite at odds with the more liberal idea of, well, not having guns inside a house and not hunting animals. And so I imagine most people would feel uncomfortable and particularly they would feel uncomfortable because The speaker revels in the danger of the gun. She openly admits how much she enjoys it and how much she enjoys the killing process. Listen.
Soon the fridge fills with creatures that have run and flown. Your hands reek of gun oil and entrails. You trample fur and feathers. There's a spring in your step. Your eyes gleam like when sex was fresh.
Soon. After the rabbit, the current is the never-ending violence. Of course it's not enough to have killed once. because once you've tasted it you can't stop. and she reminds us that all these creatures used to run, they used to flow, they used to exercise agency over their own actions and just be living creatures who made their own decisions, who lived their own life even if they were animals.
and she seems to welcome the change and the attitude of her partner. he tramples over their feathers as if they're nothing. he disrespects their bodies by hanging them by i don't know just leaving them on the table as if they're nothing as if they're there for entertainment and they're hunting for pleasure rather than for necessity and she likes this change because she's attracted by the violence by the new energy in his eyes by him becoming more masculine she likes the gleam in her husband's eyes because it brings a new passion into their love life reek entrails dangling dead They all bring to life a gruesome image of disrespect and death and these images are very much at odds with the clean shot or spring or like fresh sex, just love in general.
These images are messy and quite frankly disgusting and by contrasting this image of freshness and of decay throughout the entire poem, Fever shows us just how much destructive change a Glenn can bring. And describing sex as like fresh, as if it's fresh, with the gleam of his eyes because of killing animals shows just how animalistic they both have become. in a way she strips away the humanity of the speaker and her husband with this description and i think this could be a wider commentary on how guns kill a part of ourselves, the gender part, the sensitive part. they stop us from caring.
and continuing on with the theme of gender, of course this could also be taken as a wider commentary on gender and the power of gender, how perhaps some women are willing to overlook things that don't fit their moral codex simply because the new guy that they're attracted to thinks that they're worthy and his opinions have taken over the relationship. it's the gun jutting over the edge, the gun the phallic symbol. a gun brings a house alive. I join in the cooking, jointing and slicing, stirring and tasting, excited as if the king of death had arrived to feast. stalking out of winter woods his black mouth sprouting golden crocuses so at first the line about a gun changing a house seemed rather neutral at the very beginning but now it's clear that the speaker admires the gun it's clear her it's her position on the issue is made clear she believes that a gun is good for the because it makes the house alive.
Of course, ironic, because the house is alive because of all the dead things living inside the house. And there's no doubt that she's not condemning the actions of her partner. On the contrary, she's enjoying this new change.
And this violence in particular, this desire to kill is not something that women are usually allowed to express because it's at odds with this conception of women as a gentle, as a gentle being, as a gentle creature. So it's shows a little subversion of gender roles. But just as we begin to look into this and see a completely new woman emerging, we go back to the traditional.
We go back to her helping her husband, but actually she's not the one doing most of the killing. Instead, she's doing the cooking and the jointing. And the punctuation here, I think, is important because it shows the duality of women too and how abrupt this change has become. The use of colons in cooking, jointing.
slicing, stirring, it sets the poem into a bustle of movement, into a bustle of activity. It's almost as if she's completely enamored with this energy. And there's a little bit of nervousness here perhaps, because she can't stop doing this, but it's nervousness because of the change, because of recognizing that she's going into new territory. At this point we completely shift away from modernity because the gun is after all a modern image of man versus nature. nature, another theme explored in many of the poems on the list for this year.
But we shift away into something like pagan beliefs and the rites of passage with the appearance of the king of death. The speaker believes that death can bring new life, as we can see with the image of the king's mouth sprouting golden crocuses. So from the darkness, she believes that there can come new life, and essentially now she shows why she admires the gun.
It's not only because of the change in her... partner on a personal level, it's on a broader level too. She thinks from death there can emerge new life.
Something like reincarnation that stems from violence? The choice of death being a king rather than a queen, because women are traditionally used for images of death, is also significant. Once again showing that in her view death is a king because he's the master of all and in this way the masculine energy dominates.
And also the use of king in general could add a whole entire new layer of analysis to this poem in terms of social roles and general like social commentary on status so with that i hope you enjoyed this video and you found the analysis helpful let me know what you think in the comments as usual i love reading your comments and thank you so much for watching and see you next time