In Yehuda Amichai’s “Near a Wall of a House,” the speaker realizes and celebrates the immensity of a divine experience, in which he received “visions of God.” This twelve-line poem, which offers many of the qualities of a versanelle, masterfully increases its scope as it progresses through each tercet.
First Tercet: “Near the wall of a house painted”
The speaker’s first claim is startling with its stark contrast: in a rather inauspicious place, he has experienced “visions of God.” The unlikely location of this vision is in proximity to a stone-colored house with a wall. The house is only “painted” to look like stone, and the speaker does not reveal the material from which the house is actually constructed.
The contrast between the artificiality of the house’s appearance and the profound experience of intimations of the Divine could not be more intense. The claim resonates in the reader’s consciousness an enigmatic presence that begs resolution. Like a mystery story, it urges the mind to both contemplate and question simultaneously.
Second Tercet: “A sleepless night that gives others a headache”
Unlike other people suffering long, dark nights of insomnia who have been left only with “a headache,” this speaker avers that he was blessed with “flowers / opening beautifully inside [his] brain.”
His sleeplessness forced his mind to contemplate the “visions” and instead of leaving pain, these divine images transformed into natural beauty in the speaker’s mind.
“Flowers,” of course, is a metaphor that compares the fragrant beauty of envisioning the Celestial Reality to understanding and appreciating Its natural counterpart. A flower is a nearly perfect metaphor for God, because it is also a nearly perfect symbol representing the Divine.
Third Tercet: “And he who was lost like a dog”
The incident of Divine Visualization has filled the speaker with the intuitive appreciation that human mercy exists, even in a place where a human being may become lost “like a dog.”
Although the human experience may sometimes ape that of the lower mammals, the knowledge that the Divine Presence may appear at any time, because eternally omnipresent and omniscient, uplifts the human soul to hope, love, and faith: what was lost will be found “and brought back home again.”
Fourth Tercet: “Love is not the last room: there are others”
The speaker then summarizes the importance of the divine visitation: despite the magnitude of human love, the speaker now realizes that it “is not the last room”: the human soul does not stop at human love. The soul in its expansiveness presents other “rooms,” that is, other possibilities.
And the most crucial awareness that the experience has afforded the speaker is that the soul, because united with the Divine eternally, is like “the whole length of the corridor / that has no end.”
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