“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” is a lyric poem in ballad metre by American poet Emily Dickinson. The poem’s manuscript appears in Fascicle 13, which Dickinson compiled around 1861. It is one of 19 poems in the collection. Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain Slant of light” is also in this collection. With the discovery of Fascicle 13 after Dickinson’s death by her sister, Lavinia Dickinson, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” was published in 1891 in a collection of her works under the title Poems, which was edited and published by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd.
“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 chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
According to literary critic Helen Vendler, the poem’s opening foot is “reversed”, adding more colour and emphasis on the word “Hope”. Dickinson uses iambic meter throughout the poem to replicate that of “Hope’s song through time”. Most of Dickinson’s poetry contains quatrains and runs in a hymnal meter, which maintains the rhythm of alternating between four beats and three beats during each stanza. “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” is broken into three stanzas, each containing alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, totaling 12 lines. In Victoria N. Morgan’s Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture: Tradition and Experience, she writes that Dickinson’s poetry may have been influenced by 18th-century hymn culture, such as Isaac Watts and hymnal writers Phoebe Hinsdale Brown and Eliza Lee Follen. Morgan postulates that their works were introduced to Dickinson early in her life, when she attended church regularly. She believes that the “simplicity” of the hymnal form allowed Dickinson to make this “an easy target for parody.”
The poem calls upon the imagery of seafaring adventures with the use of the words “Sea” and “Gale”. Dickinson uses the metaphor of hope as a bird that does not disappear when it encounters hardships or “storms”. Vendler writes that Dickinson enjoys “the stimulus of teasing riddles”, as seen when she plays with the idea of hope as a bird. Dickinson alludes to hope as something that does not disappear when the “Gale” and “storm” get worse and whose song persists despite the intensity of whatever is attempting to unseat it. She also says that no matter what the speaker of the poem is doing, hope does not leave even if they offer nothing in return to it. Dickinson describes hope as a bird, a metaphor for salvation. She has nine variations of the word “hope,” which can be interpreted in multiple ways. Morgan writes that Dickinson often writes about birds when describing acts of worship, which coincides with the format of the hymn. Birds in Christian iconography are often doves. Dickinson often alludes to nature in her poems. In this poem, the bird and the violent weather create a balance between the destructive and the beneficent. The poem also juxtaposes the interior and exterior worlds, with the soul interior and the storms exterior.
Dickinson uses dashes liberally in the poem, ending nine lines with them. She also capitalised common nouns, such as “Hope,” “Bird,” and “Extremity.” Scholar Ena Jung writes that Dickinson’s dashes are among the most “widely contested diacriticals” in contemporary literary discussions. In his Poetry Handbook, John Lennard writes that Dickinson’s poems rely heavily on her use of dashes, capitalisation, and line and stanza breaks. He says her “intense, [and] unexpected play” with capitalisation and dashes makes her poetry “memorable”. Read aloud, the dashes create caesura, giving the poem a staccato rhythm. Jung says Dickinson’s use of dashes creates a “visible breath” for the speaker of the poetry.
