Without a healthy 'outer self,' the inner self would be affected as well. The poem's focus was not so much about physical disease and affliction, but instead, social and moral disease, wherein blindness, deafness, and torture of the human soul (or inner self) were the consequences brought about by the individual's exposure to the social and moral decline of human society. Thus, the inner self suffered from the effects of being influenced by external factors, and the social and moral decline Marvell identified as the "disease" that plagued the body was synonymous with the immoral and socially regressive individual who was influenced by society's excesses and faults. The Body's lamentation, meanwhile, was actually a series of complaints against the Soul's obvious reference to the individual's conscience and morality. While the Soul presented a good argument in accusing the Body of morally defiling the individual through afflictions that were social and moral in nature, the Body countered that the Soul's complaints were trivial compared to its worries. This was because the Body experiences difficulty in reconciling its physical needs with what the Soul desires -- it was trying to balance and address the needs of both...

The Body countered, "O, who shall me deliver whole, From bonds of this tyrannic soul? Which, stretched upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go... Has made me live to let me die a body that could never rest, Since this ill spirit it possessed..."
This passage provided an enlightening insight between the Body and Soul's relationship. By identifying the Soul as 'tyrannical,' Marvell laid bare the fact that morality and conscience, which the Soul represents, bring difficulty and complexity to the lives of humans. The Body's lamentation argued the fact that humanity would be better off without these restrictive standards of morality, which only bring about prejudice, discrimination, and conflict among people, in the same way that Body and Soul experienced conflict within the individual.

What Marvell had presented in the poem was a 'glimpse' into the nature of the Body and Soul as he interpreted it from his experience. In the poem, he considered the Soul as restrictive due to its want to experience a morally straight life, while the Body was afflicted with the moral diseases that it was directly exposed to a society that was experiencing social and moral decline.