Everyday Canvas

Do the Eyes Show the Soul?

Prompt: “What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
Walt Whitman
Do you sometimes look in other people’s eyes and imagine who they may be and what they may have done with their lives? Also, do you think this is what most poets and writers do?

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Walt Whitman’s quote is from A Song of Myself from the Leaves of Grass. It is a long poem and talks of many things, but with all due respect to the poet, in real life I can’t see a thing except someone’s irises when I look into their eyes. The rest could be totally imagination on my part.

Has anyone ever looked into Osama Bin Laden’s eyes? They are pretty enough and they can belong to a regular person, but which one of us thinks he isn’t an evil tyrant?

Then, one of the most disturbed persons I knew had the most gorgeous green eyes (in my opinion) and when she smiled at you, you’d believe she was heaven-sent.

I think, most poets and writers, if they want to use a real person as one of their characters, take other things into consideration about the person as well as the eyes.

Most of the time, when people say they saw something or other in someone’s eyes, they don’t mean the eyes themselves but other things surrounding the eyes. For example, when people are sad or worried, they furrow their brow, which makes the eyes look smaller. Or when happy, raise their eyebrows when they’re happy, making the eyes look bigger and brighter.

Then, the pupil acts like the aperture on a camera, dilating or contracting to regulate the amount of light coming into the eye, the pupillary light response as it is called. Strong emotions also may have some effect on the size of the pupils but this is only noticeable probably by the eye doctors. Therefore, the poets and romantics may claim that the eyes may be the windows to the soul, but the pupils alone may show better what’s going on in the mind rather than the entire eye.