Essay
Analysing 'The Soul selects her own Society'
Analysing 'The Soul selects her own Society' by Emily Dickinson, an A grade exam style answer.
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‘The Soul selects her own Society’Explore how Emily Dickinson presents ideas and feelings about the soul in ‘The Soul selects her own
Society’ and make connections with one or two other poems from your collection.
You should consider Dickinson’s use of poetic and stylistic techniques and significant literary or other
relevant contexts.
In this poem, Dickinson describes a female figure who rejects conventional society, preferring to
seclude herself and choose very selectively where she will focus her attention.
In the opening two stanzas, the meter is much more irregular and halting where the iambic trimeter
and tetrameter is interrupted with the regular use of caesuras. The use of sibilance in the first and
strongest line in the poem ‘The Soul selects her own Society’, creates a sombre and quiet tone which
is ominous, where this reclusive choice is more than a human decision, but is deeper spiritual
choice. The mood is highlighted with the imagery: the voiced plosive in the concrete noun ‘Door’, in
contrast with the voiceless plosive in the dynamic verb ‘shuts’, that presents an unarguable set of
rules, foregrounded with the sequencing connective ‘then’. At the time of writing this poem,
Dickinson was the only one left in her family to have not been ‘saved’. Therefore, unlike the 19th
century women spurning the conventions of social and religious obligation, Dickinson rejects this
and takes little notice of the Puritan citizens of Amherst, describing them in a slight sardonic tone
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