17 pages • 34 minutes read
Emily DickinsonThe Soul unto itself
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1891A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Soul Selects her Own Society” by Emily Dickinson (1862)
A poem often paired with 683, this poem explores the concept of the imperial, empowered soul. Here the soul endures no treason but rather acts to defend its complex integrity by seeking shelter against and away from the real-time world, content to select one or two others to admit.
“Think of the Soul” by Walt Whitman (1871)
One of the set pieces from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (which Dickinson knew well), Whitman expounds on the concept of the importance and viability of the soul. He testifies to its reality and suggests, in ways Dickinson agreed, that despite the oppressive reality of the material universe and the dicey concept of a Christian afterlife, the body maintains a soul that is at once imperial and vulnerable.
“Holy Sonnet VII” by John Donne (1633)
Dickinson has often been called America’s Metaphysical Poet. She read widely of the works of these English Renaissance poets, among them Donne, admiring as much their theological speculations as their innovative experiments in prosody. Here, Donne, a bishop in the Anglican Church, speculates on the Christian soul and its inevitable showdown with the bookkeeper God. He maintains the faith Dickinson finds at best elusive, at worst ironic.
Further Literary Sources
“‘The Uncomfortable Self’: Emily Dickinson’s Reflections on Consciousness” by Charlotte Kupsh (2018)
This article provides a helpful overview of Dickinson’s complicated philosophical speculations on the relationship between the body and the soul. Informed by her wide-ranging reading in theology, her argument struggled to account for the concept of the all-powerful soul and the evident limits of consciousness.
“‘Trinity of Divinity’: God, Human Soul, and Nature in Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson” by Wafa Nouari (2022)
This article grounds Dickinson’s contradictory arguments about the soul and its function in her reading of both Emerson and Whitman. As in Poem 683, for Dickinson the reality of the soul confirms the reality of God—without the soul, Dickinson concludes, humanity is only the most glorious expression of nature.
“‘I Told My Soul to Sing’: Finding God with Emily Dickinson” by Rachel Pietka (2014)
For all her poems on love and nature, this article argues that Dickinson was primarily a theological poet. Although Poem 683 is not specifically used, the argument celebrates Dickinson’s willingness to affirm God in nature, in the love of others, and supremely in her own confidence that she is more than her heart and more than her intellect.
Listen to Poem
Although there is a vast resource of readings of Dickinson’s poetry, many of them set to music and backed with gorgeous imagery, all available on YouTube, there is only a single reading of Poem 683. It is by Professor Adrian Fort, part of his Stripped Lit website that offers a wide-range of readings with complementary analysis. This reading then is professorial rather than artistic. Unfortunately, although this presentation is well-intentioned, the reading fumbles through Dickinson’s complicated phrasings (to the point that Professor Forte tries reading it again). And the reading misses entirely the savage irony of the closing couplet. The reading segues into a long and rambling analysis that does little to elevate the poem.
Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
