An Explication of A Little Piece of Heaven

The first stanza invokes a rather blatant metaphor for life, an uphill struggle, over rough terrain, through which a person must persevere by hard work, in some sense alone. This is an intentional, small misdirection - possibly leading one to suppose that the little piece of heaven in question is some idyllic spot in the mountains - in a slap at the metaphors of religious doctrine which often obscure the simple, profound truths they might have been intended to illustrate. At the same time, the real setting of a hiker, on a solo trek, lends itself to contemplation; a journey to the inner self, as well as some summit of the earth, a traditional place for revelation.

The second stanza begins with a contradiction of the image of the lone hiker. She is never alone, because within her is her father's soul. This implies that he is dead, since we usually don't speak of someone's soul as being anywhere but with its corporeal manifestation when alive. But where is it after the body has died? Her father's soul has infused her with all of its qualities. Who she is was affected by the person he was and their relationship. The use of a parent and child makes the effect self-evident. The specific use of a woman and her father, both sexes, stresses that the relationships are universal. Also technically, it allows the pronouns' referents to be unambiguous. "Father" is capitalized, both because the woman thinks of him by that name, and to identify his soul with what we might consider to be god.

In the third stanza, the infusion of the father's soul is seen to extend to all of his friends. Thus, his essence continues, in life, foiling death's inevitable finality. This is emphasized by the stanza's last line's breaking the pattern set in the first two stanzas, of a couplet with matching participles. There's also an intended play of "defuse" on "diffuse" - a soul diffuses through the living as the souls of those in whom it lived on, live on themselves in yet others.

The last stanza explicitly references heaven, which we find is created in the living, who, in hosting the souls of those they knew, experience the joy of angels. A return of the couplet with participles, now beginning, instead of ending, as they did in the first two stanzas, each line resolves the tension produced by death in the third.

The specific little piece of heaven that is the subject of this poem is the collective mind of all of those living in which the soul of the hiker's father lives. It may be inferred that there is an analogous hell. It may even be that a soul is in heaven in some and in hell in others.

Personal Notes

The father I had in mind when I wrote the poem was, of course, mine. I've been thinking of this subject since some time not long after he died, but didn't write this poem until some confluence of forces made me think of the opening metaphor and my own experience of hiking in the mountains, finding my father there, with me, somewhere he never went in his life.

The structure - three syllables per line, five lines per stanza, four stanzas - resonates with the (3, 4, 5) right triangle, evoking Pythagoras, not for any philosophical reason, but more for the fun of playing with math, part of my heritage, and in allusion to a memory of mine.

One of the nearly tangential forces was my remembering an old (now, politically incorrect) joke that my father had told at the dinner table when I was young. His delight in awful puns, and mental arithmetic, another area of dinner conversation, infuse me. As I reconstruct that joke, I can see his beaming face, hear his laugh as he gives the punch line.

Hank Dolben