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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
This is a poem about the soul. Despite her extensive familiarity with centuries of theological writings, Emily Dickinson is not going to solve in an eight-line poem the problem that has perplexed Christian theologians and secular philosophers since Antiquity: what exactly is the soul? It is, however, her interest. After all, the poem would scan the same had she used the word “heart” instead of soul or even “brain,” familiar and accessible entities that would have in turn removed the weight of ambiguity.
Much like her fellow New Englander Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose Transcendental publications Dickinson read with interest, Dickinson here must be content not to define the soul, which exceeds the grasp of even the most intrigued poet, but rather to argue its importance. I am not sure what the soul is, the poem argues, but it is important, central to how a person engages life and crucial to how the person handles the dynamics of relationships, the integrity of yearning, and ultimately the reality of isolation. The soul then is offered here as the central element of a person’s life. Without limiting the soul to the strictures and dogma of any religion, the poem offers rather how this thing we agree to call a soul at once expresses emotions and ideas, feelings and thoughts.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson