What Is - Analysis

Paradise as a place you could actually arrive at

The poem’s central insistence is bluntly practical: if Paradise is real, it has to be livable for a particular person with a particular hometown and a particular body. The speaker doesn’t treat Heaven as an abstract reward; she treats it like a destination whose customs, clothing, and social rules matter. That’s why her first questions are almost comically local: Do they know that this is Amherst, and that I am coming too. Paradise is tested by whether it can recognize her address, not by whether it can dazzle her imagination. The tone is playful, even chatty, but it’s also a way of refusing vague comfort. She wants details because she wants assurance.

Heaven imagined as work, not clouds

Her first image of the afterlife is agricultural: Are they Farmers, Do they hoe. Instead of harps or halos, she imagines labor she already understands. That choice does two things at once. It lowers Heaven to the scale of everyday life, and it quietly raises everyday life into something potentially sacred. If the people in Paradise are farmers, then Heaven isn’t an escape from the ordinary; it’s an ordinary world without some of the ordinary world’s threats. The tension here is that the speaker both longs for difference and mistrusts it. She wants Paradise to be better, but not so strange that it erases who she is or what she knows.

New shoes, scolding, and the fear of being childish

The poem keeps translating theology into childhood concerns: Do they wear new shoes in Eden; Won’t they scold us when we’re homesick. The question about shoes is funny, but it also hints at class and embarrassment: shoes mean propriety, and propriety means safety from being laughed at. The speaker worries Paradise may reproduce the same social pressures that shaped her on earth—being corrected, being judged, being told your feelings are improper. Even homesickness, which should be innocent, becomes something you might get punished for. The contradiction is sharp: Heaven is supposed to cure sorrow, but she suspects it may merely supervise sorrow, the way adults supervise children.

Borrowed certainty: a Father in the sky

Midway through, the speaker shifts from questioning Paradise to leaning on someone else’s confidence: You are sure there’s such a person / As a Father in the sky. That You sounds like a parent, a teacher, or the religious voice of the household—someone who speaks with certainty about what the speaker can only imagine. The phrase such a person makes God oddly concrete, almost like a neighbor you might appeal to if you get turned around. The speaker’s tone becomes less teasing and more cautious: So if I get lost there ever. Paradise is now a place where you can be disoriented, which quietly undermines the idea of Heaven as instant clarity. Even there, she might need help.

Death filtered through the Nurse

One of the poem’s most telling turns is how it names death: Or do what the Nurse calls die. The speaker can’t (or won’t) claim the word directly; it arrives as adult vocabulary, administered like medicine. That small distance makes the poem feel like a child’s or a childlike mind’s negotiation with mortality—serious, but not solemn in the usual way. And right after that comes the most physical fear in the poem: I shan’t walk the Jasper barefoot. Heaven becomes a terrain with a painful surface. The desire for new shoes returns here as the desire not to be hurt, not to be exposed, not to be ridiculous.

Ransomed people, laughter, and the hope of less loneliness

The speaker’s anxiety sharpens into a social dread: Ransomed folks won’t laugh at me. Salvation is imagined as a club whose members might mock a newcomer. Yet the ending loosens the knot with a wry, homespun hope: Maybe Eden a’n’t so lonesome / As New England used to be! Paradise is finally measured not by bliss but by company—by whether loneliness lifts. That last comparison is both tender and cutting. It suggests that the speaker’s hardest suffering may not be physical at all, but regional and domestic: a New England culture of restraint, correction, and emotional coldness. Eden, in her imagination, becomes less a garden of perfection than a place where your neediness won’t be punished.

If Heaven must feel like home, what does that say about home?

The poem keeps bargaining for a Paradise that won’t shame the speaker for being small: for being homesick, for getting lost, for needing shoes. But that raises a troubling possibility. If she has to ask whether Eden scolds, whether people laugh, whether God gets told how cross she is, then the world she comes from has trained her to expect surveillance even in comfort. Paradise, in other words, isn’t just a belief; it’s a test of whether kindness can exist without control.