The Soul
Give the invisible part of you a body, a habit and an address.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about the soul: giving the invisible a body, with craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, exercises and prompts in this free Writory guide.
What this theme is
The soul is the self beneath circumstance: whatever remains when the job title, the postcode and the passport photo are peeled away. That makes it poetry's most tempting subject and its most dangerous, because nothing invites vague, floating language faster than an invisible topic. The poets who write the soul well solve the problem the same way every time: they give it a body. Emily Dickinson made the soul a formidable householder who selects her own society and shuts the door on emperors. Walt Whitman invited his to loaf with him on the grass like an old friend. The soul becomes writable the moment it becomes physical.
Soul poems are also, quietly, poems about what survives. After a loss, an illness, a divorce or a migration, something continues, and the poem's real question is what that something is made of. You do not need a theology to write this theme; you need only the honest sense, which nearly everyone has, that there is a difference between what happens to you and what you are.
Why poets return to it
Poets reach for the soul when identity poems need another storey underneath: not who am I, but what is the 'I' that keeps asking. The theme also forces craft discipline like nothing else, since every abstraction must be paid for with an image or the poem dissolves. Get that exchange rate right and the reward is a poem that feels larger inside than outside, which is exactly the quality that makes judges and readers sit up.
Where it comes from
The soul is one of poetry's oldest employers. The Upanishads circled the self beneath the self; the Psalms addressed the soul directly, telling it to wake, to hope, to bless. Rumi opened his great Masnavi with a reed flute cut from the reed bed, crying to return to where it was taken from, an image of the soul's homesickness that has travelled eight centuries. John Donne argued with his soul and his God in the Holy Sonnets like a barrister who knows he is losing.
Dickinson, in the 1860s, turned the soul into a character with moods, doors and unnerving self-possession. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrung his sonnets out of spiritual crisis, and in the twentieth century Derek Walcott wrote perhaps the theme's most beloved modern poem, in which you finally arrive at your own door and greet the self you had abandoned, and are told, in effect, to sit and eat.
The elements that carry it
- Doors, windows and rooms: the architecture poets keep giving the inner life, with all its lockable privacy.
- Breath, wind and birds, the oldest metaphors for spirit; the word itself descends from words for breathing in several languages.
- Mirrors and still water, where the self meets its own gaze and does not always recognise it.
- Light behaving strangely: through curtains, under doors, in the gap between shutter and sill, the visible standing in for the invisible.
- Small stubborn objects that outlast their owners, a ring, a handwriting sample, a worn chair, hinting at what persists.
Techniques that work
- Personify the soul with habits, preferences and bad moods, as Dickinson did; a soul that slams doors is instantly more believable than one that shimmers.
- Pay for every abstraction on the spot: if the word 'soul' or 'spirit' appears in a line, put something touchable, a kettle, a moth, a bus ticket, in the same sentence.
- Try direct address. Argue with your soul, question it, accuse it, the way Donne battered at heaven; conflict gives the invisible a pulse.
- Let white space and short lines do the believing for you: silence around words is the closest typography comes to the sacred.
- Define the soul by what it does under pressure, what it refuses, what it keeps, what it does at 3 a.m., rather than attempting to say what it is.
Mistakes to avoid
- Unmoored abstraction: 'my soul soars toward eternity's light'. Nothing there can be seen, weighed or doubted. Fix: one concrete image per claim, no exceptions.
- Recycling religious imagery without personal stake, borrowed candles, generic angels. Use the tradition you actually have, even if it is doubt.
- Wall-to-wall solemnity. Dickinson is frequently witty about the soul, and the joke is what makes the awe trustworthy; let some humour in.
- Confusing soul with mood. A bad Tuesday is not a dark night of the soul; keep the theme for what persists beneath weather, not the weather itself.
An exercise
Write a poem in which your soul is a tenant living in your body as a rented flat. Describe the state of the rooms, what it has done with the walls, which repairs it keeps requesting, and what it does while you sleep. Stay concrete for at least twelve lines.
A challenge
Write three short poems addressed to your soul at three ages, seven, the age you are now, and ninety, and let the language age with the addressee. Notice which of the three knows things the others do not.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about the moment you were most certain you had a soul, or most certain you did not, and set it somewhere aggressively ordinary: a supermarket queue, a motorway service station, a dentist's chair.
Before you submit
- The word 'soul' appears fewer times than the images that embody it.
- The soul in the poem does at least one specific thing; it is a character, not a mist.
- Any religious imagery is personally inhabited rather than borrowed for atmosphere.
- There is at least one moment of lightness, doubt or wit to balance the reverence.
- The ending lands on an image or action, not on the word 'eternity' or its cousins.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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