Your body is a temple, No littering

Andrew Marvell is a metaphysical poet and as such contemplates the relationship between the soul(mind) and body. In “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body” Marvell portrays the dialogue between someone’s soul and their body. He uses imagery to paint a very clear picture of their suffering: “With bolts of bones, that fettered stands/ In feet, and manacled in hands”. The word “bolts” brings to mind something hard, cold, and heavy. “Fettered” means chained and manacles are restraints. The thought of thick, rough, cold iron gripping painfully around your wrists and ankles and restricting your movement is the image this one phrase is meant to bring to mind. The soul feels tortured and restrained in the harsh and uncomfortable body. The body responds in equal despair: “…this tyrannic soul?/ Which, stretched upright, impales me so…”. The soul “impales” the empty body. Emotions pierce the otherwise shallow and uncaring body, and force it to feel. The word upright has two meanings in this phrase. It means upright as in stretching the body uncomfortably, but also the soul gives the body a conscience. The soul knows right from wrong and forces the body to do the right thing when it would much rather follow it’s animal instincts: “…warms and moves this needless frame/ (A fever could but do the same)”. The body feels the soul is unnecessary and lives just to torture it. The soul feels the same way: “Constrained not only to endure/ Disease, but, what’s worse, the cure;/ …. Am shipwrecked into health again”. Not only is the soul forced to endure the suffering of disease, but the soul also feels tortured that it must become healthy again. The soul wants nothing more than to be free from the torturous dungeon the flesh has made and so it despairs when the body heals. Each and every sentence of this poem is filled with sharp imagery as the examples above. It causes the reader to feel the body’s and soul’s pain through the imagery.