17 pages • 34 minutes read
The Soul unto itself
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Literary Devices
Form
Given Dickinson’s daring reinvention of poetic forms and her careful sculpting of lines that give her poems their idiosyncratic look, Poem 683 looks surprisingly, well, conventional. Although later editors broke the poem into two quatrains, the original handwritten copy, sent to her longtime friend, newspaper publisher Samuel Bowles, is a single eight-line poem.
That might appear to be merely an annoying form adjustment—after all, the poem is so brief it hardly requires such division. But Dickinson relished playing with irony, bringing together contradictory ideas within the same argument without attempting to reconcile the contradiction. Her poems thus often use her eccentric sense of form to play up her thematic argument: The world is a fascinating/terrifying place where contradictory absolutes make perfect sense.
In this, Dickinson’s original form may help understand a poem that suggests that the soul is at once mighty and vulnerable, united and fragmented, both friend and enemy to us. How better to underscore that contradiction than to argue the divisions within the soul in a poem that has no divisions, where complete ideas move one to the next despite how contradictory they each to are the next. Each couplet argues the exact opposite of the couplet before it. Without the comforting text-space of the stanza break, that back-and-forth argument maintains its integrity.
Meter
The metrical pattern here furthers that sense of a poem containing contradictions and making irregularity regular. The poem is dominated by iambic trimeter. In iambic trimeter, the line is composed of three units of unstressed and stressed syllable. For instance, Lines 1-2:
The Soul unto itself
Is an imperial self
Trimeter beat is reader-friendly as its easy rhythm matches the metrics of conversation. The meter does not invite over-the-top dramatics. Both stanzas maintain the same beat structure in that the first, second, and four lines are iambic trimeter. But that third line is awkward, stumbling, requiring a hesitancy and interrupting what would otherwise be a coaxing and gentle read. Indeed, the word “agonizing” (Line 3) is in fact agonizing to recite if you try to maintain the iambic trimeter. Add to that the deliberate metrical aberration of Dickinson’s quirky placement of her hyphens that, in turn, fragment the poem in unexpected moments, and the metrical pattern suggests what the poem argues thematically. Regularity and irregularity, beat and anti-beat coexist, suggesting the poem’s larger argument about the soul being one thing and exactly the opposite.
Voice
With a poem that refuses to offer a context for its meditations on the contradictory nature of soul, voice becomes an intriguing mystery. Who is speaking and to whom is that voice directed? Are we to believe that suddenly, without prompting, the “poet” decides to expound on these complex metaphysical questions? Who is listening to it? Does that same speaker then address these complex observations, observations that fly so deliberately in the face of conventional ideas about the integrity of the soul and its power? Is that same speaker suggesting the soul is its own worst enemy to some specific audience, perhaps a Christian or an atheist? The poem invites conjectures about who might be the intended audience. Given the historical reality that Dickinson actually sent this poem as a letter to a friend with whom she may or may not have been infatuated raises the possibility that, in Poem 683, we sort of read Dickinson’s mail, a deeply ironic love letter in which she all but admits her soul will forbid what her heart wants.
In the end, however, the inevitable conclusion, one which often defines the voice of a poet who saw publication as “dreary,” “being public like a frog” (Poem 260), and who acknowledged her poems were like letters addressed to a world that never answered (Poem 441), is that here the voice is addressed to the poet herself as she struggles quietly to sort through her emotional conflict. Thus, we eavesdrop on a poem that tries to offer to the poet herself some explanation for the conundrum she sees implicit in the nature of a soul in creatures as fallible and as imperfect as humanity.
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By Emily Dickinson
