The Human Soul In Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island
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Phineas Fletcher was an English poet who lived from 1852 to 1650. Fletcher is most famous for his scientific and religious poem The Purple Island, which is also known as The Isle of Man. The Purple Island contains 12 cantos in seven-line stanzas and is considered an epic poem. Fletcher wrote and published The Purple Island along with The Piscatory Eclogues and The Poetical Miscellanies all in his magnum opus in the year 1633.
Fletcher’s poem, The Purple Island, is contemplated to be allegorical; many people also interpret The Purple Island to be of an apocalyptic genre. This epic allegorical format of Fletcher’s poem, The Purple Island, examines the relationship between the human body and the human soul by merging both the anatomical viewpoint and the devotional viewpoint of oneself, as well as religious and other viewpoints, such as corporeal and geo-national ones. The Purple Island compares the anatomy of a human body to an island. Fletcher does this by illustrating an island that possesses purple rivers flowing all around and across the island, which are reminiscent of veins and arteries coursing through the human body that carry blood all about and throughout the human physique. The island in The Purple Island also accommodates the cities of Liver, Heart and Braine; these cities are meant to represent the human heart, human liver, and human brain. There is also a city that is meant to represent the stomach. The human skeleton is symbolized by the island’s foundation,