“The Soul selects her own Society” Introduction

• Emily Dickinson's "The Soul selects her own Society" was first published posthumously in 1890, long after Dickinson wrote the poem in 1862. In this poem, the speaker celebrates the virtues of an independent and mostly solitary life. The speaker envisions her soul as a queenly figure who chooses her company carefully, without regard for worldly status or prestige. The poem's innovative use of slant rhyme and meter sets it apart from contemporary poetic standards; like the soul it describes, this poem obeys only its own rules.

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“The Soul selects her own Society” Summary

• The soul chooses her own company, then closes the door on everyone else. She's no longer available to most of the world.

  She's not swayed by elegant carriages waiting outside her humble gate, and she wouldn't be swayed even if a powerful king knelt down on her doormat to beg for her company.

  I've known her to choose one single person out of a whole country's worth, and then shut down her notice of anyone else, firmly as a stone.

“The Soul selects her own Society” Themes

• 

  Self-reliance and Individuality

  In “The Soul selects her own Society,” a speaker justifies her decision to lead a mostly solitary life. The speaker argues that the soul (functioning here as a kind of stand in for the speaker herself) naturally rejects the outside world in favor of her own inner circle. In doing so, the speaker champions individuality and self-reliance in a society that often values neither of these qualities.

  The speaker begins by claiming that the “Soul selects her own Society”—in other words, that the soul chooses its own companions. These companions could be actual people or a metaphor for the speaker’s thoughts. In either case, the soul then “shuts the Door” in the face of “her divine Majority," closing herself off from anyone not in this inner circle, no matter how "divine." By casting out the majority of people and ideas, no matter how important they might seem, the speaker chooses a life of relative solitude.

  This speaker can't be swayed from her resolve by any worldly power. She comments that the soul is “Unmoved” by “Chariots—pausing— / At her low Gate," and won't open the door even if an “Emperor be kneeling / Upon her Mat.” The fact this speaker wouldn't even let a powerful emperor in shows that she's truly indifferent to prestige. The people and thoughts that make it through the soul's gate are granted access based on the soul's own criteria, not the values of society at large.

  All this doesn’t mean that the speaker is totally alone, however. She says at the poem’s end that she will “Choose One” companion from “an ample nation” before closing the “Valves of her attention.” This “One” might be a lover or a close friend; what’s clear is that the speaker is very choosy about who that person will be.

  On a metaphorical level, the act of choosing one from “an ample nation” could also be an image of the creative process. The soul might be just as idiosyncratically selective about the ideas that catch her fancy as the people. In either reading, the speaker demonstrates her strong sense of independence and her ability to thrive according to her own rules.

  Overall, then, the speaker celebrates the capacity for self-reliance in a society that often values more public virtues like status, wealth, and power. "Unmoved" by these values, the speaker is free to embrace the strength and pleasure of her own tastes and preferences.

  Of course, there might be a downside to all this self-reliance. Some readers might take the fact that the speaker closes herself off “Like Stone” to mean that she’s a little too rigid and unyielding in her refusal to engage with the outside world. Then again, maybe she’s simply secure in her convictions. And by describing the soul as a separate being from herself, perhaps the speaker shields herself from seeming a little too much "Like Stone" to the uncomprehending world. This, she seems to say, is just the way the soul behaves; don't look at me.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Soul selects her own Society”

• Lines 1-2

  The Soul selects her own Society —
  Then — shuts the Door —

  "The Soul selects her own Society" starts in the middle of a strange scene. A personified "Soul" chooses the company she prefers, then firmly and unapologetically "shuts the door" on everyone else.

  This "Soul" is both decisive and abrupt, and the shape of the lines mirror her attitude. The poem begins with a line of steady iambic pentameter—five da-DUM feet in a row. This is one of the most common meters in English-language poetry, and might set the reader's ear up to expect a familiar form, like a sonnet. But then comes the short, sharp second line: iambic dimeter, a mere two da-DUM feet, like this:

  Then — shuts the Door —

  This short, crisp line is only emphasized by the strong dash in the middle. That caesura creates a tiny moment of suspense, suggesting that the people outside the soul's "Door" might be waiting to see what she's going to do next. If they're hoping to get in, they're only going to be disappointed. The sibilant /s/ and /sh/ sounds of these first two lines makes it sound as if the soul has opened and shut her door so fast that the people outside can hear the breeze whistling past. This soul, the reader can already tell, has a firm and uncompromising sense of the company she wants—and doesn't want.

  But whose "Soul" is this, anyway? The speaker here writes as if she's a third-person observer, looking on at this soul's unaccountable behavior. But already there's a sense that this speaker might know the soul she describes rather more intimately. Placing herself at a little distance from her own soul, the speaker seems to claim plausible deniability. It's not me who chooses only a friend or two and then shuts everyone else out, she suggests: it's just my soul, doing what souls do.

• Lines 3-4

  To her divine Majority —
  Present no more —

  

  

• Lines 5-8

  Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
  At her low Gate —
  Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
  Upon her Mat —

  

  

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• Lines 9-10

  I've known her — from an ample nation —
  Choose One —

  

  

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• Lines 11-12

  Then — close the Valves of her attention —
  Like Stone —

  

  

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“The Soul selects her own Society” Symbols

• 

  The Emperor

  The imagined "Emperor" who comes to beg for the soul's favor (and the "Chariots" that herald his arrival) symbolizes worldly power and success. The soul doesn't care two beans about this emperor when he comes calling, suggesting she has little time for the things the outside world might consider important: wealth, status, and acclaim mean nothing to her. Perhaps there's a hint here that the soul isn't moved by romantic gestures, either: the kneeling emperor might be asking (unsuccessfully) for her hand in marriage.

  While the world has no power over the soul, the soul seems to have some power over the world! After all, the "Chariots" and "Emperor" are abasing themselves in front of the soul's humble house, with its everyday "low Gate" and "Mat." Perhaps the sovereign soul has a power beyond the worldly, as well as in opposition to the worldly.

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• 

  The Soul's House

  The speaker uses an extended metaphor comparing the soul to a house. More specifically, the soul seems to have a house, with doors, a gate, and a doormat, but the soul also seems to be that house, with the power both to let people into her inner world, and to keep them out.

  This house metaphor, in turn, reflects the way the speaker perceives of the soul: as something closed off and self-contained, with the capacity to shut out unwelcome guests. The idea of the soul being/having a house also evokes the symbolic comfort and intimacy of the home.

  Also note that this house isn't fancy: it has only a "low Gate," not a drawbridge, and there's a perfectly ordinary "Mat" out in front for visiting emperors to kneel on. But its normalcy is also part of its power. While the soul's house isn't anything special, it's also completely her own.

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“The Soul selects her own Society” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Sibilance

  The sibilant opening of "The Soul selects her own Society" set the tone for the whole poem. Sibilance comes in different flavors: it can be soft and delicate, or menacing and snaky. Here, both of those tones come into play. Listen to the repeated /s/ and /sh/ sounds in the first two lines:

  The Soul selects her own Society —
  Then — shuts the Door —

  This is a poem about the power of a quiet life, and that power is evident in the very sounds of these words. There's a hint of a whisper in those sounds, but also the hint of a hiss: the "Soul" the speaker describes is shy and retiring, but forceful, too, in her own strange way. The repeated /s/ sounds here make it seem as if the soul isn't just politely shutting the door, but closing it so fast that the reader can hear the breeze whistling around its edges.

  But this sibilance is also hushed and private, suggesting that while there's plenty going on behind the soul's closed door, it happens very quietly indeed—and its power might not always be evident to the "divine Majority" standing outside.

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• Personification

  

  
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• Caesura

  

  

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• Anaphora

  

  

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• Metaphor

  

  

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• End-Stopped Line

  

  

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"The Soul selects her own Society" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Society
• Majority
• Chariots
• Emperor
• Ample
• Nation
• Valves

• Here, "society" means the company of other people.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Soul selects her own Society”

• Form

  Like many of Dickinson's poems, "The Soul selects her own Society" doesn't use an existing form (like the sonnet), but invents its own. This brief poem uses three quatrains (four-line stanzas), almost every line of which ends in one of Dickinson's favorite punctuation marks: the dash. (See the Poetic Devices entry on end-stopped lines for more on those dashes.) Dickinson's unusual choices around meter and rhyme here also contribute to the poem's idiosyncratic effect; read more about that in the Meter and Rhyme Scheme sections.

  There's a simplicity to these three punchy quatrains that mirrors the personified soul's matter-of-fact rejection of the "divine Majority." The soul gives no explanation for her choices: she simply makes them. The poem's brief and unusual form reflects this soul's unapologetic independence.

• Meter

  "The Soul selects her own Society" uses an unusual, irregular meter. This meter takes a moment to reveal its strangeness. The first line is perfect iambic pentameter—that is, five da-DUM feet in a row, like this:

  The Soul | selects | her own | Soci- | ety —

  This is one of the more common meters in English-language poetry. But the speaker follows it up with something much less predictable:

  Then — shuts | the Door —
  To her | divine | Major- | ity —
  Present | no more —

  While the feet stay predominantly iambic, there's also a trochee (DA-dum) in there at line 4, and the meter is all over the place, with a pair of two-beat dimeter lines and a single four-beat line of tetrameter.

  The rest of the poem follows a similar (but still unpredictable) rhythm, moving back and forth between longer and shorter lines. That pattern gets even more pronounced in the final stanza, when the speaker uses two lines of rare iambic monometer, just one da-DUM: "Choose One" and "Like Stone."

  This peculiar meter mirrors the poem's emotions. Just as the soul reaches out to "select her own Society," then "shuts the Door" on everyone else, the meter answers a long, reaching line with a short, thumping retort. That retort only gets firmer at the poem's end: those lines of monometer are as heavy and lone as the "One" and the "Stone" they describe.

• Rhyme Scheme

  Like many of Dickinson's poems, "The Soul selects her own Society" uses an irregular rhyme scheme. But the first stanza might lull the reader into a false sense of security. It runs like this:

  ABAB

  ABAB rhyme schemes are pretty common in English-language poetry, so no surprises there. But things get weirder in the second and third stanzas. These still follow an ABAB scheme, but all of their rhymes are slant, like the partial match between "One" and "Stone," or the even more distant and tenuous connection between "pausing" and "kneeling."

  Perhaps these almost-rhymes suggest the soul's selectivity. The rhymes of the first stanza, in which the "Soul selects her own Society," match perfectly, but in the following stanzas, in which the soul unflappably shuts out her unchosen visitors, are all just a little out of joint. This is a "Soul" who will admit only the best-matched company to her inner circle.

“The Soul selects her own Society” Speaker

• The speaker of "The Soul selects her own Society" tells the reader a lot about herself without describing herself directly at all.

  At first, the poem's speaker seems to be a third-person watcher, describing the ways of the personified "Soul" from a slight distance. But then, in the last stanza, the speaker suddenly becomes an "I," someone who knows the soul she's been describing. While this seems to put the speaker at a distance from the soul, the reader gets the distinct sense that soul and speaker might actually be parts of the same being—not least because this reserved soul seems to have a lot in common with the shy, reclusive Dickinson herself.

  Perhaps distancing herself from her own soul gives the speaker impunity to be as choosy about her company as she likes: after all, it's not she who refuses to admit any more people into her life, but her soul.

  If this speaker and this soul are indeed one and the same, then this speaker is solitary, queenly, and unflappable. Worldly power doesn't seem to mean much to her; she's happy to ignore an "Emperor" in favor of her own choice of friends. She seems to find power and pleasure in her solitude and selectivity. Her images of emperors and chariots also suggest that she's got a vivid imagination to keep her company!

“The Soul selects her own Society” Setting

• This poem isn't set in any specific physical place, but in a metaphorical one: a locked house from which the "Soul" rejects unwanted visitors. In the first stanza, the soul merely "shuts the Door" on those visitors; later, she watches "Unmoved" as they loiter hopefully outside "her low Gate." Something about the procession of "Chariots" and the desperate "Emperor" suggests that the soul's house is fit for royalty. But then, the lowness of that gate and the everyday "Mat" in front of the door also hint that this house is a perfectly normal and humble one. The soul's home, the poem suggests, doesn't have to be a palace to be under a queenly command.

Literary and Historical Context of “The Soul selects her own Society”

• Literary Context

  Like the reclusive "Soul" of this poem, Emily Dickinson led a quiet life away from the public eye, never seeking literary fame. Although Dickinson printed a few poems anonymously during her lifetime, no one knew the scope and greatness of her work until after her death in 1886, when her sister found a secret trove of poetry in her room. Many of these poems were published in an 1890 collection, Poems of Emily Dickinson, which included "The Soul selects her own Society"—a poem written many years earlier in 1862.

  Dickinson was a strikingly inventive poet, and her work stands out from that of her mid-19th-century contemporaries. She did, however, share an interest in the sublimity of nature with Transcendentalists like Walt Whitman, and the earlier English Romantics (especially William Wordsworth) had a big influence on her deceptively simple style.

  "The Soul selects her own Society" is a prime example of Dickinson's willingness to play with rhyme, meter, and diction. But these innovations weren't always welcomed: Dickinson's early editors aggressively reshaped her poetry to make it more palatable to the public. It was only in 1955, when the scholar Thomas H. Johnson published a more faithful edition of the complete works, that readers could fully appreciate Dickinson's ingenuity.

  Dickinson would become one of the most important figures in American poetry in the generations following her death. Writers from Sylvia Plath to Evie Shockley—among many, many others—have claimed her as a major influence on their work.

  Historical Context

  "The Soul selects her own Society" was written in the early 1860s, right in the tumultuous heart of the American Civil War. This era was the most productive period in Dickinson's career: she wrote nearly half of her poems over the course of the war. While "The Soul selects her own Society" does not directly address current events, Dickinson was certainly aware and involved, and even contributed a few poems to a newspaper promoting a fundraising effort for the Union Army.

  A Massachusetts native, Dickinson was firmly on the Northern side of the conflict. Although "The Soul selects her own Society" doesn't make any direct allusions to the world around Dickinson (and, indeed, seems keen to shut the world out!), perhaps the deep ethical divisions between Americans during this period influenced the poem's interest in self-reliance and choosing one's company carefully.

More “The Soul selects her own Society” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to a recitation of the poem by reader Julie Harris. 

  • Dickinson's Biography — Read a short overview of Dickinson's life and work.

  • Emily Dickinson Museum — Visit the website of the Emily Dickinson Museum.

  • Dickinson at the Brooklyn Museum — Learn about a Dickinson exhibit at a feminist art installation. Here, Dickinson (among other notable women) is commemorated with a place setting at a massive triangular table, representing women's creative power through history.

  • Emily Dickinson's Letters — Investigate Dickinson's  correspondence with her close friend and editor Thomas Higginson.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson

  • A Bird, came down the Walk

  • After great pain, a formal feeling comes –

  • A Light exists in Spring

  • A Murmur in the Trees—to note—

  • A narrow Fellow in the Grass

  • An awful Tempest mashed the air—

  • As imperceptibly as grief

  • A still—Volcano—Life—

  • A Word dropped careless on a Page

  • Because I could not stop for Death —

  • Before I got my eye put out

  • Fame is a fickle food

  • Hope is the thing with feathers

  • I cannot live with You –

  • I cautious, scanned my little life

  • I could bring You Jewels—had I a mind to—

  • I did not reach Thee

  • I died for Beauty—but was scarce

  • I dreaded that first Robin, so

  • I dwell in Possibility –

  • I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

  • If I can stop one heart from breaking

  • I had been hungry, all the Years

  • I have a Bird in spring

  • I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

  • I like a look of Agony

  • I like to see it lap the Miles

  • I measure every Grief I meet

  • I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  • I started Early — Took my Dog —

  • I taste a liquor never brewed

  • It was not Death, for I stood up

  • I—Years—had been—from Home—

  • Like Rain it sounded till it curved

  • Much Madness is divinest Sense -

  • My life closed twice before its close

  • My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun

  • Nature is what we see

  • One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted

  • Publication — is the Auction

  • Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

  • Shipwreck

  • Success is counted sweetest

  • Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

  • The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

  • The Bustle in a House

  • The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants

  • There came a Wind like a Bugle

  • There is no Frigate like a Book

  • There's a certain Slant of light

  • There's been a Death, in the Opposite House

  • The saddest noise, the sweetest noise

  • The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean

  • The Soul has bandaged moments

  • The Wind – tapped like a tired Man –

  • They shut me up in Prose –

  • This is my letter to the world

  • This World is not Conclusion

  • 'Twas the old—road—through pain—

  • We grow accustomed to the Dark

  • What mystery pervades a well!

  • Whose cheek is this?

  • Wild nights - Wild nights!