The Soul unto itself

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.