Emily Dickinson beautifully, concisely describes the transcendental self-referral value of true inner solitude by realizing her unbounded Self.
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself —
Finite infinity.
When Emily admits the self to the Self, she reiterates the Vedic injunction to transcend, retire, Nivartatwam, into that infinitely silent, Shivam, infinitely peaceful, Shantam, undivided, Advaitam, fourth, Chaturtham, state of consciousness, Atma, the Self.
Emily Dickinson succinctly describes the eternal nature of Love in this short but powerful poem.
Derek Walcott had his own way of describing this return to love, to one’s Self, in Love after Love.
Read how Emily Dickinson wanted her poems to look on the page, described in Rebecca Mead’s Back of the Envelope in The New Yorker: Poesy Dept. | January 27, 2014 Issue. See Emily D.-envelope poems.
Related poem: For Emily Dickinson the brain is wider than the sky and deeper than the sea—a finite infinity.
Famous Poets and Poems lists 1779 of Emily Dickinson’s poems!
Tags: Emily Dickinson, infinity, peace, self-realization, silence, solitude, states of consciousness, Vedic knowledge
The Uncarved Blog 
August 17, 2014 at 7:21 pm |
My favorite Emily poem. And “polar privacy” clearly refers to “Atma” which, as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi says, is the “flow from infinity to point value, from point to infinity, infinity to point.” (from the “pole of infinity” to the other pole, its point). Emily was certainly a “Transcendentalist”.
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August 26, 2014 at 7:15 pm |
[…] another Vedic perspective from America’s greatest poet, see Emily Dickinson’s Solitude, where she describes the self-referral process of the self integrating with the Self, finite […]
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August 27, 2014 at 11:41 am |
[…] See Emily Dickinson’s Solitude is Vedic Nivartatwam and Emily Dickinson succinctly describes the eternal nature of Love in this short but powerful poem. […]
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September 1, 2014 at 11:58 am |
[…] See Emily Dickinson’s Solitude. […]
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April 21, 2020 at 3:05 pm |
There is a word missing, I believe, from the poem as you posted it. The word is “but”. Here is the poem as it should be:
There is a solitude of space, A solitude of sea, A solitude of death, but these Society shall be, Compared with that profounder site, That polar privacy, A Soul admitted to Itself: Finite Infinity.
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April 21, 2020 at 5:03 pm |
Craig, thank you for pointing that out!
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April 21, 2020 at 5:06 pm |
“Purity of the teaching!”
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