On 303

("The Soul Selects Her Own Society") Essay, Research Paper

Anthony Hecht

This poem is not usually conceived of as a riddle, but rather as

a description of those instinctive preferences and choices, those defiantly nonrational

elections and allegiances, like love, that we all make, without regard to personal

advantage, to rank or to estate. To the degree that the poem has been construed as a

private and guarded revelation of the poet’s emotional life, and to some circumstantial

events in it, there is a dispute about whether the choice of "one" means someone

else or the poet herself; whether she is electing the solitude of a society of one, or

committing herself to another. And it is not out of place, I think, to construe the poem

as being about love. The mixed metaphor of the last two lines ("Then close the valves

of her attention/Like stone") could be rather comfortably resolved if we substituted

"heart" for "soul," since hearts can be "stony" and they

have valves.

But I suggest that the power of this poem derives from a suppressed riddle, an unstated

but implied parallel. As the soul is to its society (absolute, arbitrary, ruthless) so is

God in His election and salvation of souls. Moreover, it seems to me that the second

stanza not improbably suggests the adoration of the Magi, though I have no care to press

that point. Still, the ominous quality of the final words is considerably amplified when

the ultimate mystery of election is taken into account. We play at being God; it is

characteristically human of us to do so.

From "The Riddles of Emily Dickinson." Obbligati (Atheneum, 1986).

Suzanne Juhasz

Poem 303 is a strong statement about the power of the self alone. The soul is shown

living within a space defined by door, gate, and mat. The external world, with its nations

and their rulers, is kept outside. . . .

Traditional ideas about power are reversed here. Not control over vast populations but

the ability to construct a world for oneself comprises the greatest power, a god-like

achievement, announces the opening stanza. Not only is the soul alone "divine,"

but it is also identified as "Society" and "Majority": the poem also

challenges our ideas about what constitutes a social group. Consequently, the enclosed

space of the soul’s house is more than adequate for a queenly life, and ambassadors of the

external world’s glories, even emperors, can easily be scorned. Yet while the speaker

claims her equality with those most powerful in the outer world–they may be emperors, but

she is "divine Majority," at the same time she asserts her difference from them;

for her domestic vocabulary of door, low gate, and mat establishes her dwelling as not a

grand palace but rather a simple house.

While associating power with the enclosed space of the mind, the poem also implies how

isolation is confinement, too. When the soul turns in upon her own concerns, she closes

"the Valves of her attention– /Like Stone–."

Valves permit the flow of whatever they regulate in one direction only: here, from

outside to inside. Either of the halves of a double door or any of the leaves of a folding

door are valves. Valves seen as doors reinforce the poem’s house imagery, while their

association with stone makes the walls separating soul from world so solid as to be,

perhaps, prison-like.

Prison-like because they allow no escape from the kinds of conflict, the kinds of

terror, even, that must occur within.

From The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind.