Soul and Heart

“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” –Mother Teresa

As with so many of the other poems I have fondly blogged about, it seems that I have found yet another Emily Dickinson poem about the heart and love. The poem “Heart not so heavy as mine” is the topic of my blog today because it talks about the heart but with a different meaning than love. The story within the poem is about a person who whistles a free-spirited tune that annoys yet at the same time pleases the speaker. ‘Heart not so heavy as mine, wending late home, as it passed my window whistled itself a tune’ refers to the heart as the person’s soul which is lighter in mood than the speaker and therefore is whistling a little jingle. It can be inferred that the speaker is obviously sad since her soul is in a drearier mood than that of the whistler and it may be that the speaker has been sad for some time. The next two stanzas of the poem are spent describing the song the whistler plays and how the speaker finds it irritatingly sweet. It seems that this description would be an oxymoron yet Dickinson describes the speaker’s feeling with great skill that the reader intuitively accepts the description of what the song means to the speaker. The last stanza describes the desperate longing the speaker has to have such a light soul as the whistler by the speaker’s need to hear the whistler again. Emily Dickinson is a very note worthy poet who in this poem showed her true magic with a pen by her amazing ways of conveying such feeling into this four stanza poem. There is much to say about the beautiful images that the poem conveys and its excellent flow and rhyme. This poem speaks of the heart in a very interesting way that it is rarely used today. Many a writer has associated the heart with love and passion but very few have used it to describe a person’s happiness and soul. This piece is very easy to relate to because everyone has been down in the dumps at one time or another and then heard or saw something that just made them laugh that they forget about the hurt for awhile and enjoyed the light-heartedness of the moment. I think that is why this piece really jumped out at me when I was searching the poem archives because just recently I was so upset at my brother and the pain he seems to always try and cause me when my best friend in the world sent me a video text message of her dancing around her room to this song she has been obsessing over and it just made me laugh and I forgot for an instant all the hurt that had been heavy on my heart before and just laughed. For that I dedicate this entry to my bestie in the world, you know who you are trick!


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