Explore "My Heaven" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Unhoused in deserts of accepted thought, / And lost in jungles of confusing creeds, / My soul strayed, homeless, finding its own needs / Unsatisfied with what tradition taught.
The pros and cons, the little ifs and ands, / The but and maybe, and the this and that, / On which the churches thicken and grow fat, / I found but structures built on shifting sands.
And all their heavens were strange and far away, / And all their hells were made of human hate; / And since for death I did not care to wait, / A heaven I fashioned for myself one day.
Of happy thoughts I built it stone by stone, / With joy of life I draped each spacious room, / With love's great light I drove away all gloom, / And in the centre I made God a throne.
And this dear heaven I set within my heart, / And carried it about with me alway, / And then the changing dogmas of the day / Seemed alien to my thoughts and held no part.
Now as I take my heaven from place to place / I find new rooms by love's revealing light, / And death will give me but a larger sight / To see my palace spreading into space.