Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount
Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Throughout her life, she seldom
left her home and visitors were few. The people with whom she did come in contact, however,
had an enormous impact on her poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles
Wadsworth, whom she first met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after
a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of
verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important
figure in her life, it is not clear that their relationship was romanticshe called him my closest
earthly friend. Other possibilities for the unrequited love that was the subject of many of
Dickinsons poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court judge, and Samuel
Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican.

By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, but actively
maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her
family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving
in Congress for one term. Her brother, Austin, who attended law school and became an attorney,
lived next door with his wife, Susan Gilbert. Dickinsons younger sister, Lavinia, also lived at home
for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were not only family, but intellectual
companions for Dickinson during her lifetime.

Dickinsons poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century

England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New
England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to
Christianity.

She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though
she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitmanby rumors of its
disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the
founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet
and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her
lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955.
She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinsons family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems,
or fascicles as they are sometimes called. Dickinson assembled these booklets by folding and
sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems.
The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some
are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of
her many early editors, who removed her unusual and varied dashes, replacing them with
traditional punctuation. The current standard version of her poems replaces her dashes with an
en-dash, which is a closer typographical approximation to her intention. The original order of the
poems was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the
paper itself to restore her intended order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures, and other
clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued that there is a thematic
unity in these small collections, rather than their order being simply chronological or
convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) is the only volume
that keeps the order intact.

Lines 1-2
"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -

Our speaker starts off on a hopeful note. She's not just being optimistic here.
She's literally talking about hope.
Speaker note: we're just guessing that our speaker is a she at this point, since we've just
read one word of this poem. Check out "Speaker" for more details.
Actually, she's talking about "Hope." What's up with those quotation marks?
It's ambiguous. We have just read one single word at this point, so maybe things will clear
up.
For now, though, we can say that quotation marks can be a sign of sarcasm, as in the
following sentence:
I decided not to thank my dog Fido for his attempt to "redecorate" my living room by
shredding all the couch cushions.
When something is in quotation marks, it can also be thought of as an idea or a concept:
This massage chair is bringing me the ultimate in "user centered" technology.
In this case, the latter explanation makes more sense. Our speaker probably wants us to
think about the idea of hopeyou know, not some woman named Hope.
Okay, that was a lot to say about just one word. So what about "hope"?
Well, it has feathers, apparently. It also "perches," which seals the metaphor: our speaker
wants us to think of hope as a bird.
Only, instead of a cage, this particular bird hangs out in the soul.
That's one amazing bird. Let's see what else it can do

Lines 3-4
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

You know, this hope-bird just keeps impressing.

The metaphor continues here, as our speaker tells us that this bird sings without words.
That seems appropriate. We don't know too many birds that include lyrics with their
songs.
It does more than just sing, though. It sings without stopping as in ever. Maybe it should
get into the pop scene.
But wait, this isn't just some big-lunged bird that likes to thing. Don't forget that we're in
metaphor land here. The speaker is really talking about hope.
By this token, hope is something that never stops singing. In other words, hope is a steady
force. It's always there.
Before we head off to the second stanza: did you hear any echoes in these lines?
 If you were listening closely, it might have soundedalmostlike line 2 rhymed with line
4. Was Dickinson just bad at rhyming words?
Also, what's up with all these dashes? They're at the end of every line, and they also offset
"at all" in line 4.
You've got questions about the way this poem is put together? Don't worrywe've got lots
more to say about all this kind of stuff over in "Form and Meter."

Line 5
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

This new stanza picks up where the last one left off. The fancy poetic term for that
is enjambment.
And the idea that it continues is this: the hope-bird is always singing, and it sounds
"sweetest" when there's bad weather going on. (A "gale" is a strong wind.)
Now, why would a bird be singing sweetly in the middle of bad weather? Most birds we
know would be battening down their nests.
Well, if this song is still tied metaphorically to hope (and it is), then the idea here is that,
when things are at their roughest, that's when hope is at its most beautiful.
That checks out, right? When everything is falling apart, sometimes you only have hope
left. That makes hope a pretty special thing.
Lucky for us, that bird never stops singing.

Lines 6-8
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

Here the speaker elaborates on her idea from line 5.

Yes, the hope-bird sings most sweetly when things are rough. You know what else? Things
have to be really rough to dim the power of that music.
Line 6 describes a "sore" storm. No, it hasn't just stubbed its toe. "Sore" can also mean
severe or intense.
The idea, then, is that the storm would have to be really awful for it to "abash" our hope-
bird.
"Abash" can mean to embarrass, but it can also mean to disconcert or make nervous.
So, for anything to lessen the power of this hope-bird's sweet singinga force that has
helped so many people ("kept so many warm")things would have to be really, awfully,
just super-bad like Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars bad. We're talking seriously bad here,
folks.

Lines 9-10
I've heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
 In the final stanza, our speaker starts off by talking about Jamaica, or somewhere equally
chillmaybe Hawaii or Tahiti.
No waitscratch that. As it turns out, "chill" actually meant "cold" back in Dickinson's
dayimagine that. So, our speaker is not talking about a chill place to hang out and kick
it. Instead, she means this more literally, as in the coldest place on Earth. Think the Arctic
Circle or Fargo.
But don't think too literally here. She doesn't have a specific place in mind. The point is
that our hope-bird's song can still be heard even in the worst of environments, when it
seems like the world has gone cold or when everything seems strange.
Even then, when all chips are down and things seem totally awful, that hope-bird just
keeps tweeting away.

Lines 11-12
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Our speaker can't help but pay the hope-bird one more compliment.
To recap: this little dude is always there, singing his heart out, evenor especiallywhen
times are rough. Only the most purely awful situations could throw this bird off its game.
Here, the speaker references those really bad times with the word "Extremity."
Now, this is a strange choice of words, we have to admit. To most folks, an extremity is an
arm or a legsomething located at the extreme end of your body.
Another way to think about this word, though, is as the extreme version of difficultyin
other words: the worst hard time.
And now, here's one more thing that's great about the hope-bird: even when things are at
their worst, it never asks anything in return. It's just there to help.
Thanks, hope-bird. You truly are the best

Themes of Dickinson's Poetry

Because Emily Dickinson lived much of her life inside, her poetry focuses on her inner struggles.
Throughout her poems, she questions God and writes of her own struggles with faith, particularly
in her sufferings. In addition, her poems also focus on her confusion with self-identity. Though
she lives alone, she becomes someone through her writing. However, if no one is reading the
poems, is she really a person?
Dickinson often feels imprisoned in her own body. Furthermore, Dickinson often relates this
question of self to her questions of God. What role does God play in defining self? What
situations does He create for people?
Finally, Dickinson often writes on the power of words. The strongest voice Dickinson has is her
own; however, this voice is really only seen in her poetry. Poetry becomes her language and her
way to communicate with the outside world. She also shows a strong relationship between nature
and her poetry. Often times, nature becomes a symbol in her writing to explain the complexity of
her relationships.
Hope is the thing with feathers...

Summary

The speaker describes hope as a bird (the thing with feathers) that perches in the soul. There, it
sings wordlessly and without pause. The song of hope sounds sweetest in the Gale, and it would
require a terrifying storm to ever abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm. The speaker
says that she has heard the bird of hope in the chillest land / And on the strangest Sea, but
never, no matter how extreme the conditions, did it ever ask for a single crumb from her.

Form

Like almost all of Dickinsons poems, Hope is the thing with feathers... takes the form of an
iambic trimeter that often expands to include a fourth stress at the end of the line (as in And
sings the tune without the words). Like almost all of her poems, it modifies and breaks up the
rhythmic flow with long dashes indicating breaks and pauses (And never stopsat all). The
stanzas, as in most of Dickinsons lyrics, rhyme loosely in an ABCB scheme, though in this poem
there are some incidental carryover rhymes: words in line three of the first stanza rhymes with
heard and Bird in the second; Extremity rhymes with Sea and Me in the third stanza,
thus, technically conforming to an ABBB rhyme scheme.

Commentary

This simple, metaphorical description of hope as a bird singing in the soul is another example of
Dickinsons homiletic style, derived from Psalms and religious hymns. Dickinson introduces her
metaphor in the first two lines (Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul
), then develops it throughout the poem by telling what the bird does (sing), how it reacts to
hardship (it is unabashed in the storm), where it can be found (everywhere, from chillest land to
strangest Sea), and what it asks for itself (nothing, not even a single crumb). Though written
after Success is counted sweetest, this is still an early poem for Dickinson, and neither her
language nor her themes here are as complicated and explosive as they would become in her more
mature work from the mid-1860s. Still, we find a few of the verbal shocks that so characterize
Dickinsons mature style: the use of abash, for instance, to describe the storms potential effect
on the bird, wrenches the reader back to the reality behind the pretty metaphor; while a singing
bird cannot exactly be abashed, the word describes the effect of the stormor a more general
hardshipupon the speakers hopes.
 Project
In
Literature 2
(compilation of the poem Hope-Emily Dickinson)

Submitted by:
Ana Luz D. Estay
BSed-2
Submitted to:
Mrs. Zita Catan