Both Edgar Allan Poe in his poem “Ulalume: A Ballad” and Emily Dickinson in her poem “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” direct my thoughts towards melancholia and the alienation that stems from it.

Poe’s narrator in Ulalume struggles with the past and the feeling of having trespassed into a site associated with regret and despair. The sense of involuntary solitude depicted in the poem is not only spatial—the speaker struggles with time and the loss of meaningful relationships. The images of “the ghouls who can only walk through wooded dark” or “one that leads to a funeral” suggest a distanced self-portrait wherein each one’s past encumbered with grief and guilt stands as sustained self-banishment.

Interestingly, in the case of Dickinson’s poem ‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society’, Dickinson explores even a more active kind of isolation. Once the soul chooses its own company, it shuts off all external influences such as power or authority. Such self-seclusion is self-imposed, an isolating retreat into the mind, possibly for security reasons. When the soul “like Stone” closes the valves, it unleashes the power of agency in determining who and what we allow in our lives, and when.

Upon reading both poems, I came to understand that isolation can be either voluntary or a response to external stimuli. In a way, Poe’s speaker is driven by the fear of death and the need to face some kind of loss, maybe on a subconscious level. Dickinson’s tense soul, on the other hand, chooses to be alone and focus on herself instead of anything else. The picture is enriched since the other type of isolation is more about seeking and embracing instead of being forced to, as many of us fear. These poems prompt me to consider if the purpose of each of our isolated moments is to bring about healing, or if it’s more about resisting or obstructing something unpleasant.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.