Emily Dickinson

Emancipation

EMANCIPATION.
No rack can torture me,
My soul 's at liberty.

Soul vs. bone

The 'mortal bone' is the physical body—temporary, destructible. The soul 'knits' inside it like a separate structure, permanent and untouchable.

Behind this mortal bone
There knits a bolder one
You cannot prick with saw,
Nor rend with scymitar.

Scymitar spelling

Archaic spelling of 'scimitar' (curved sword). Dickinson pairs medieval torture (rack, saw) with Eastern warfare—cataloging every way bodies get destroyed.

Two bodies therefore be;
Bind one, and one will flee.
The eagle of his nest
No easier divest
And gain the sky,

Eagle simile pivot

The comparison flips mid-sentence. You can't strip the eagle from its nest any easier than you can strip yourself from your soul—but the 'thou' here suddenly addresses the reader.

Than mayest thou.
Except thyself may be
Thine enemy;
Captivity is consciousness,

Final paradox

Both captivity and liberty exist only in consciousness—in how you think about yourself. The whole poem collapses into this: freedom is mental, not physical.

So 's liberty.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Two-Body Problem

Dickinson splits the self into mortal bone and immortal soul, but the relationship isn't simple dualism. The soul doesn't just inhabit the body—it knits inside it, suggesting active construction, something woven tight. This matters because her argument depends on the two being separable: "Bind one, and one will flee."

The torture instruments escalate: rack (stretches bodies), saw (cuts them), scymitar (slashes them). She's listing every physical threat available to a 19th-century imagination, then declaring them all irrelevant. The soul has no surface to saw, no joints to rack. It's "bolder" than bone—architecturally stronger, not just braver.

The eagle metaphor (lines 9-12) does double work. First, it claims you can't separate an eagle from its essential nature any easier than you can chain a soul. But the syntax breaks weirdly: "Than mayest thou" shifts from describing the eagle to addressing the reader directly. You can't be stripped from yourself—unless you do it to yourself, which is the trap door the final lines spring.

Consciousness as the Real Prison

The poem's last three lines undo everything before them. After fifteen lines insisting the soul can't be captured, Dickinson pivots: "Except thyself may be / Thine enemy." External captivity is impossible, but self-imprisonment is the only captivity that exists.

"Captivity is consciousness, / So 's liberty." Both states are mental constructs. You can be physically free but mentally chained (consciousness of captivity). You can be physically imprisoned but mentally free (consciousness of liberty). The poem titled "Emancipation" doesn't celebrate freedom—it argues freedom and bondage are both things you think yourself into.

This fits Dickinson's biography: she barely left her Amherst house for decades but wrote 1,800 poems. Was she captive or free? The poem suggests the question is badly formed. The rack and scymitar are distractions. The real question is what you tell yourself about the room you're in.