Essay
Analysing 'The Soul has Bandaged moments'
Analysing 'The Soul has Bandaged moments' by Emily Dickinson, an A grade exam style answer.
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‘The Soul has Bandaged moments -’Explore how Emily Dickinson presents ideas and feelings about the soul in ‘The Soul has Bandaged
moments’ 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.
This poem depicts terror to ecstasy and back to a nameless horror, intense emotional experiences
of freedom and entrapment are conveyed through a series of concrete images. Dickinson describes
the dramatic and even perilous extremes to which the soul is subject.
In the first two stanzas Dickinson draws imagery from gothic horror. She converts the noun ‘The
Soul has Bandaged moments’ to an adjective which gives the line a memorable emphasis as we are
used to hearing the word as a noun or verb. This metaphor can describe protection from the outside
world but also a stifling constriction of depression, a terror which inhibits her movement, her
paralysis from fear highlighted through the stative verbs ‘has’ and ‘feels’. The dominance of the
male figure is demonstrated through action, dynamic verbs which are increasingly intrusive, ‘come
up’, ‘stop to look’ are high frequency verbs which increase the tension and imply a sadistic
enjoyment of the speaker’s fearful anticipation. The intimate dynamic verbs ‘salute her’, ‘caress’
describe an increased violation, the contact highlighted with the listing of concrete nouns that
describes the speaker ‘freezing hair’, but also the ‘Fright’s’ ‘long fingers’ and ‘lips’. This suggests
that in its depression the soul converts the touch of a lover to the touch of a ‘goblin’ and considering
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