The Soul unto itself

There is a paradox at the core of Poem 683. Mysteries explored are supposed to yield to clarity. The reward for pondering the mysteries of the cosmos is theoretically the gift of insight, the reassuring illumination of some sort of epiphany. If a poem explores love, for instance, the assumption is that the poet will offer in the end an insight into the heart that will help illuminate the mysterious energy of love. In Poem 683, however, which up front and openly sets out to explore the nature of the soul, starts with a contradictory mystery and then refuses to resolve that contradiction. It allows two opposing ideas to exist at the same time. The soul is both your friend and your foe. The soul will be at peace and in charge only when your heart and your body agree to abide by its power, a reality that for most people would be hard to imagine.

Thus, the soul is omnipotent and impotent, both imperial and surrendered, both awesome and pathetic. The poem then explores an essential mystery (what is the soul?) that, in exploring it, not only refuses to reveal itself but in fact becomes more mysterious.

The poem is like a word problem in, say, a philosophy seminar or in a law school colloquium or in any forum from a classroom to a bar designed to provoke argument and test responses, rather than offer a single resolution, a single grand insight. Poem 683 asks rather than answers the questions it raises. Can the soul ever be in charge of the person? The poem assures us that if that can happen you would see the true magnificence of the soul. If the body and the mind would, could, find their way to be in sync with the soul and its dictates, imagine the results. Then, the poem cautions, imagine that actually happening.

Whether in matters of the heart or in the day-to-day negotiations of family or work, imagine the power if we acted in a way that the body, the mind, and the soul would agree. The poem suggests that what happens far more often is the heart wants what the heart wants and pursues it independent, or in defiance, of what the brain says much less what the soul dictates. Or the person acts coolly according to logic or acts within the dictates of the soul and in turn must handle regrets and inevitably find life desolate, lonely, and unfulfilling.

Where is this closing moment when the soul, entirely empowered, reveals at last its awesome dimensions? When will it happen? In the end, like many other existential philosophers, Dickinson arrives at an impasse. In theory, the soul acting with its own body, acting in concert with the heart and the intellect, would be a stunning, awesome moment—a moment, the poem acknowledges only ironically, is at best a theory. The poem invites the reader to investigate scenarios as a way to fathom the immense and inscrutable mystery of having a soul in the first place. Would not life make more sense if we negotiated only the body and the mind? The soul confounds with its complexity. The soul, so apparently powerful, seems vulnerable from within, at the mercy of impulses and thoughts that run counter to the soul’s imperatives despite the soul’s imperatives being in the best interest of, you got it, the soul itself.

For instance, test the scenario of love and the crazy whirl of falling in love sometimes with exactly the right person, often with exactly the wrong person. Take any of Christianity’s much ballyhooed seven deadly sins and create a scenario when doing the wrong thing for the right reason makes problematic the entire premise of the soul’s sovereignty. How often, the poem suggests, we do the wrong thing for the right reasons or the right thing for all the wrong reasons. The soul is forever in conflict with the soul. Thus, the brief poem raises infinitely complex and ultimately unanswerable propositions about the soul itself.