The Message in Seventh Heaven by Patti Smith
“I don’t agree with the dogmas of any church. They’re just man-made laws that you can
decide to abide by or not” – (Patti Smith, Bomb Magazine, Winter 1996)
Seventh Heaven by Patti Smith is an open form poem made up of thirty lines within two
visible stanzas. There’s no rhyme scheme and both the stanzas and the lines vary in length.
The title’s denotation is a state of extreme happiness and joy; and the highest heaven,
where God and the most angels dwell. This poem is Patti Smith’s ode to the Seventh
Heaven as she addresses some of the disjunctions she finds in life and religion. The open
ending leaves it open to many interpretations, but I write to convince you that the message
Patti Smith writes is to question the purpose of the divine and what it has done to women’s
sexuality. I believe she’s suggesting that religion is designed by men for men and
oppresses women by making them victims of internalized sexism. In order to be able to see
that message and appreciate the beauty of this poem, various elements will be analyzed
and explicated.
What I find interesting about this poem is its mixture of a dialectical argument that is
Shakespearean sonnet-like. There are four sections in this poem like the quatrains of a
Shakespearean sonnet. Each of the first three sections being four lines long and the last
section being two lines long or a couplet. In respect to a 4:9 ratio, first three sections are
nine lines in length and the last ‘quatrain’ is a tercet or three lines in length. There is no
visible separation in these ‘quatrains’ – with the exception of the first nine lines – but there
are contextual distinctions in the poem. The subject is established in the first quatrain, the
speaker’s considerations advance in the second, the Volta is rounded in the third, and the
summarizing, expansive, ironic, conclusion is in the last tercet. I think the reason for the
visible structure of two stanzas is to warn or advise the reader of the mid-course turn this
poem takes. As its counterpoint to the thesis blends into its argumentative position, it ends
abruptly on an anomalous beat.
The poem’s very first line, “Oh Raphael. Guardian angel. In love and crime”, has the
introspective, bard-like flow of a soliloquy similar to that of Juliet’s in Romeo and Juliet
