"A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body" (A Poem)

Composed in 1681, Andrew Marvell's "A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body" builds on the medieval literary genre of the soul's complaint about its physical encasement; however, unlike its religious predecessors, which pit the pious soul against the sins of human flesh, Marvell's work takes a philosophical perspective, where the both entities bemoan their symbiotic dependence on each other.[1] 

SOUL 
O who shall, from this dungeon, raise 
A soul enslav’d so many ways? 
With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands 
In feet, and manacled in hands; 
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;
Tortur’d, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart.

BODY
O who shall me deliver whole
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
Which, stretch’d upright, impales me so
That mine own precipice I go;
And warms and moves this needless frame,
(A fever could but do the same)
And, wanting where its spite to try,
Has made me live to let me die.
A body that could never rest,
Since this ill spirit it possest.

SOUL
What magic could me thus confine
Within another’s grief to pine?
Where whatsoever it complain,
I feel, that cannot feel, the pain;
And all my care itself employs;
That to preserve which me destroys;
Constrain’d not only to endure
Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure;
And ready oft the port to gain,
Am shipwreck’d into health again.

BODY
But physic yet could never reach
The maladies thou me dost teach;
Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,
And then the palsy shakes of fear;
The pestilence of love does heat,
Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat;
Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex,
Or sorrow’s other madness vex;
Which knowledge forces me to know,
And memory will not forego.
What but a soul could have the wit
To build me up for sin so fit?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.[2]

Works Referenced

Brackett, Virginia. The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry: 17th and 18th Centuries. New York: Facts on File, 2008.

Marvell, Andrew. "A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body." The Poems of Andrew Marvell. Ed. Nigel Smith. London: Longman, 2003. 61-63.
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[1] Brackett, 111-112.
[2] Marvell, 61-63.