Sketchbook- The Granite Shore Hotel, Rockport, page 097: Seated Female Figures
✦ Read about this
This sketchbook contains 72 pages of pencil drawings and 9 watercolors of Cape Ann. On the inside of the cover Prendergast wrote the address of the Granite Shore Hotel in Rockport, Massachusetts.
Background drawn from Cleveland Museum of Art
Today's poem
Who has not found the heaven below
Who has not found the heaven below Will fail of it above. God's residence is next to mine, His furniture is love.
Emily Dickinson · Public domain
✦ Read about this
Emily Dickinson published almost nothing during her lifetime and was largely unknown, yet her work is now regarded as canonical in American poetry. The Poetry Foundation credits her with creating "a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized" — a compression and oddness that this short poem shows in miniature.
Only four lines, the poem argues that heaven is not a distant reward but something to be found here: those who do not discover it in this life will miss it in the next. The claim is domestic rather than grand, insisting that God lives "next to mine" and furnishes his home with love.
The brevity and the homely metaphor are characteristic of Dickinson, who repeatedly treated large theological questions in plain, immediate terms. The poem collapses the distance between the earthly and the divine into the image of a neighbor.
Background drawn from PoetryDB & Wikipedia