The speaker addresses someone she loves deeply, insisting that home isn’t a place but wherever that person is. It could be a soft, rich landscape like Cashmere or the bleak hill of Calvary — the external setting means nothing. What matters is being together. The same intensity carries into the second stanza: if her beloved binds or imprisons her, she calls it play and contentment, even a sacrament. Love turns every hardship into sweetness, as long as they are “We two.” The final lines flip this. Where the beloved is absent, life becomes unbearable. Even a paradise of spices, row after row, feels like sorrow. Anything the beloved doesn’t do leaves only despair, so complete that even hearing praise from the angel Gabriel wouldn’t lift it. The poem feels like a fervent, almost unsettling devotion — a voice so singularly focused that the entire world shrinks or blooms depending on one person’s presence.
Where Thou art -- that -- is Home -- — Summary
Where Thou art -- that -- is Home -- Cashmere -- or Calvary -- the same -- Degree -- or Shame -- I scarce esteem Location's Name -- So I may Come --
What Thou dost -- is Delight -- Bondage as Play -- be sweet -- Imprisonment -- Content -- And Sentence -- Sacrament -- Just We two -- meet --
Where Thou art not -- is Woe -- Tho' Bands of Spices -- row -- What Thou dost not -- Despair -- Tho' Gabriel -- praise me -- Sire --