Rethink.

Near the Wall of a House (from poetry 180)
Yehuda Amichai (trans. by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.

A sleep­less night that gives oth­ers a headache
gave me flow­ers
open­ing beau­ti­fully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are oth­ers
after it, the whole length of the cor­ri­dor
that has no end.

Com­ment:

The poem turns on what is visible/invisible, image/being (to a degree: both the pre­vi­ous are outside/inside), and — almost hid­den — the speaker/others. Visible/invisible: the house itself; our speaker is near a wall, mean­ing he only sees part of it or no part of it at all. Image/being: the paint­ing of a wall hides what it truly is, or so attempts. “Like stone”/ “like a dog” / “like a human being:” more images, specif­i­cally like­nesses. Flow­ers are given, albeit in what seems to be a dream; they cre­ate a link between the stan­zas con­cern­ing what seems to be stone, and the dog/human being. What are the “visions of God,” exactly?

“A sleep­less night that gives oth­ers a headache” — what are they see­ing in the dark­ness? They could be see­ing the same as our speaker: those flow­ers blos­som­ing inside one’s head could be painful. They could also be near the wall of a house whose appear­ance was ques­tion­able; those flow­ers may be near the house them­selves. They most cer­tainly feel lost, like a dog, and are recov­ered as (“like”) human beings.

There are two assump­tions in this attempt to find mean­ing. First, that the speaker expe­ri­ences what oth­ers have expe­ri­enced, and sec­ond, that all the imagery given is related and not dis­crete. The sec­ond is obvi­ously more con­tro­ver­sial than the first, and jus­ti­fies a total sep­a­ra­tion between the speaker and oth­ers if rejected out­right. The poem itself men­tions rooms, imply­ing that the stan­zas stand sep­a­rate. The first feels less spec­u­la­tive taken by itself, though. The speaker’s crazy-talk fol­lows from “visions of God” and the prophecy of the third stanza. The imagery, strangely enough, fol­lows log­i­cally from what we rec­og­nize the speaker’s speech to be.

The poem pre­sum­ably started in the day and moved to “a sleep­less night.” Then we were lost, found, brought back home again. The dog — the issue of loy­alty we feel and is felt toward us — moves us well away from stone, from flow­ers, toward the human. But the like­ness of the human leads back to home, what we thought stone, strangely as the flow­ers were real in the sense they were a bridge between inanimate/animate. The flow­ers indi­cate growth. In the last stanza, we are def­i­nitely inside the home. We thought love “the last room;” our speaker moves will­ingly, we may be more fixed in our beliefs. Because he sees love as pos­si­bil­ity, he not only sees oth­ers, but he can­not help see­ing oth­ers even alone. The infini­tude of God, always on display.

• On Frost’s “Meet­ing and Passing”
• Indus­try and Divin­ity: On Hop­kins’ “God’s Grandeur”
• The Courage To Be Human: On Dickinson’s “To fight aloud is very brave…”
• The Home­ric Chal­lenge: On Keats’ “On first look­ing into Chapman’s Homer”
• An Intro­duc­tion To Emo Ram­bling: On Frost’s “The Oven Bird”

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