"Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all.

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chilliest land

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

I was especially drawn to the rhythm and tone of this poem, but one part that was difficult for me to interpret was the second stanza.

The poem commences with an obvious metaphor, connecting hope with the image of a ceaselessly optimistic bird—specifically a gale. Upon first glance the poem seems only lighthearted. There are, however, two turns in the poem which appear to be before and after the second stanza. Dickinson does a good job of seamlessly blending these stanzas together through her use of a polysyndeton. The second stanza expresses something baleful that could possibly deter and kill hope, seeming to contradict the first stanza which said the “tune” or hope would never cease to exist. The poem becomes darker when there is a possibility of hope being lost. In the third stanza the author reverts back to her original faith in hope when she expresses her gratitude for its previous work.

Dickinson meant to express the duality and complexity in hope and address the general perspectives about it. I found that the author, however, is in favor of hope and believes that it is only good. We get a glimpse of this in the last stanza of the poem. The first two stanzas have rhyme schemes of a, b, a, b. But, in the last stanza, the rhyme scheme changes to a, b, b, b. This draws attention to the last stanza, insinuating the goodness that hope brings. Furthermore, the last stanza becomes more personal with the addition of the “I” and “me.” This permits us to see the author’s positive experience with hope.