A Volcano. Past and Present.

In reading Emily Dickinson's sonnet #754, the imagery she uses surrounding the power of a gun is magnificent. She compares the power of the gun to Mt. Vesuvius, a volcano that destroyed the entire city of Pompeii in AD 79. She makes the gun seem admirable, desirable, and gives the reader a feeling of immortality. The narrator of the poem is the gun, who ends the poem concluding:

"For I have but the power to kill,
Without --the power to die--"

How mysterious, immortal and powerful!

Aaron Belz, a contemporary poet, wrote the poem Contemporary Poetry, which I'd say is quite original and telling of what the poem will be about. In his poem, Contemporary Poetry is "self-personified," like the gun in #754. The content of these two poems are vastly different and have little to do with one another. However there is one thing, one image that made me reflect upon Dickinson's poem. That image was that of the volcano. Once again, they are used in vastly different contexts, but that doesn't make it any less significant. Belz, being snide, says in the voice of Contemporary Poetry:

 "I’m sexy like that
here at the edge of your
brain’s dormant volcano.
Hey. You’re sexy too, I bet,
sitting there, reading this."

This time, the volcano is an image of useless power that is likely never to be powerful again. A contrasted use of the image of the volcano, but could it be a deliberate contrast to Dickinson? Maybe so, maybe not. Once again being snide and sarcastic, Belz writes: 

"So I won’t return to volcano
imagery but to dally in one pun
that says, if we can’t be friendshow can we be lavas?"

Volcano imagery is a thing of the past and it has no place in Contemporary Poetry. Could this be a way of placing Dickinson's poems in a different era of poetry? I'm inclined to think so.