Emily Dickinson Paradox

“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” An excerpt from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, talks of how one can become what one can fear most, by likening the abyss to a struggle or a mishap, one can understand that people in general will allow their fears and agonies to consume them. In the poem The Soul unto itself, Emily Dickinson portrays the soul as a being open to interpretation, in the poem she describes the soul as both a spy and an imperial friend, creating a paradox as one must think an, “imperial friend” could never be an “agonizing Spy”. Emily Dickinson was a paradoxical, philosophical, poet, one of the hardest tongue twisters that is also one of the hardest combination traits a poet could have, mainly because …show more content…
By using these paradoxes she is able to show the reader how complex and how much the soul leaves up to interpretation, much like human thought. Also in using paradoxes Emily Dickinson is able to convey a sense of humanity in a soul, something that is so elusive to one’s thoughts. By using the previously mentioned paradox the Imperial friend and the Agonizing enemy, one is able to see that the sense of humanity that the soul carries is valid, as one can relate that humans themselves seem to have many facets of their own, and in doing so, Emily Dickinson is able to once again show how closely knit the soul is to our own humanity. “Itself - its Sovereign - of itself” Humanity and the soul are shown to be completely intertwined in this clause, as one cannot be free of itself, neither can the soul, when one is freed, the other must as well, Emily Dickinson is conveying that both are one in the