Hope is the thing with feathers is the poem that I have chosen to explain. Emily Dickinson composed it in the year 1861. Poems of Emily Dickinson Second Series published it in the year 1891. The poem uses a bird to represent hope throughout. It starts by comparing the poem to “something with a feather” or to a bird who never stops. It continues by saying that “hope is sweetest in difficult times” or when the gale is being heard. Then, it states that you must have a severe storm to prevent hope from surviving and that your hope will keep you warm. She says in the final stanza that the storm, no matter how severe or extreme it is, will never ask for anything back.
She uses a lot of symbolism in her poem, since it is a metaphor. The bird represents hope. “Tune it sings, without words” means that the hope we have is not in words. It is in our feelings. The next stanza uses the storm and gale to represent the hard times we go through in life. We want a storm that is warm. Last but not least, in the final stanza of the poem, she refers to the “chillest” land and “strangest” sea, which is an alliteration. This represents the difficult times that we go through in our life, and also places that nobody would want stay.
Emily Dickinson, as she does in many of her poems does not have a speaker nor a particular audience. She seldom uses a particular speaker for her poems. This is because she believes that the main focus of a poem should be the subject or message, not the speaker. She wrote many poems, but she did not publish many. Instead, she kept most of them for herself and her close family members. She sent in around 100 poems to Atlantic Monthly but only a handful were published without her consent and anonymously. It is a poem about hope. Her metaphor is a bird. The poem teaches us how to appreciate hope in a deeper way than before.
The more you examine the form and the meter, the more complicated it is. It is called a ballad because it tells a tale in short stanzas. The rhyme scheme follows ABCB. Although the last stanza technically is ABBB, there are a number of accidental rhymes that carry over from the first stanza. The meter combines iambic tetrameter with iambic tricerameter. The lines of the meter have a non-stressed and then a stress syllable. For example, this is the first syllable. showing stressed syllables. No specific sentence was provided. It may appear that her form and meters are simple, but when you pay attention to them it gets quite complex.
Emily Dickinson wanted us to understand the power of hope after reading her poem. She achieved this goal. The poem uses the bird as a symbol of hope to tell us about all the wonderful things that hope can do for us.
Comments are closed.