The Soul unto itself

After reassuring the reader that the soul, despite the Christian argument that the soul is something to be treated with diligent care or it will cost you an eternity in hell, is a friend, the next couplet appears to take it back. If the soul is a friend, a powerful friend, it can also turn on itself. It can become the enemy. The symbol Dickinson uses for the split nature of the soul is a spy. Written during the height of the Civil War, when agents on both sides of the conflict were adept and daring in the art of espionage, for Dickinson (and her readers, for that matter), the spy business was quite real and quite serious. That intelligence (and counterintelligence) network, while not as sophisticated as espionage would become in the next century, gifts the poem with a sense of real danger given the nature of the soul.

How can soul be both a friend and a spy, both an ally and a betrayer, both a help and a threat? The only way a spy succeeds is to appear to be exactly like everyone else in the locale and culture the spy is invading. A spy by definition is chameleon, the spy fits in, blends in. You can’t tell the spy from the not-spies. In this, Dickinson uses the symbol of a spy to argue that the soul unto itself is both imperial and fractured. Thus, the soul is at once our most powerful moral guide and our most fallible moral guide, telling us what to do and at the same telling us what not to do. Fall in love? The poem argues the soul will compel you to enjoy the energy of such a connection while at the same time forbidding the expression of that energy on moral or ethical grounds. The soul is then like a royal court with a king, yes, but infiltrated by a dangerous spy. The king and the spy are the same people.