25. Hope is THE thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson, "Hope" is the thing with feathers (c.1861)
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Emily Dickinson, ““Hope’ is the thing with feathers (c. 1861)
Hello and welcome back! Since I am still on summer break, I am rolling with my inspo and not my syllabi when I decide what to write about for this newsletter. And this morning I work up with a line bouncing and flittering around in my head.
“Hope” is a thing with feathers.
This poem, our second to study together by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is an ode to “hope.” She wrote it during one of her most productive seasons, 1860-1865. This little poem about hope and storms is one of the 227 poems she wrote and bound during the Civil War. This poem is thought to have been copied and sent to her cousins in a letter.
When studying Emily Dickinson, we supplement our readings with scans of her original handwriting. This is because she did not publish this poem in print, but instead, copied it in her neatest hand and bound it in a fascicle, or a little handsewn book. You can see the holes where the thread bound this page in the scan below. Fascicle 13, 6 sheets folded in half, also has “There is a certain Slant of Light” included in it. These were found after her death and published for the first time in the 1890s. (Psst: Look back to my first post on ED, for more information on fascicles and Dickinson’s publication history.)
Dickinson’s poems externalize the subjective, giving her feelings and emotions and spiritual life a little heft and thing-ness, so that we can look at them together. It is like she has a deep pocket in her dress from which she pulls an item from her interiority for us to examine. This poem pulls out hope (or “hope”) for our consideration.
The first thing that the handwriting shows us is that the word hope is in quotation marks. So, we should read this not as a poem about hope, of which there are many — but one about “hope,” which is a subtle difference, to be sure. What is the difference between the “hope” that others speak and the hope that resides in me? The poem must be about the “hope” that others speak of, to be in quotation marks.
And the line bopping around in my head this morning was not the correct one. Hope is THE thing with feathers, not “a thing with feathers.” So, yes I spend a good while at the gym this morning wondering — does that matter? is “a thing with feathers” — the general thing — a different kind of hope than “THE thing with feathers” — the specific one? Worry not my friends, should I ever be stranded, my mind will be endlessly, happily at work on these little kernels of thought.
The poem is written in a delightful 4 then 3 beats, the same rhythm as church hymns, and the same rhyme scheme as ballads. And so the song that she references in line three continues whenever we read it aloud.
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops — at all
It’s near impossible to read this poem aloud without a singsongy voice, a childlike accent. Here’s a sweet version of a performance of the poem. Go ahead! do it! read the poem aloud! keep hope, the little thing with feathers, alive!
The poem/song offers caesura, or visual breaths or breaks, in the lines. Of the 15 dashes or commas, 7 of them appear in the middle of a line — to set apart for meaning. I see them as a nod, or a turn to camera 2. The tune never stops — beat — at all.
And the repetition of the word “And” at the start of most of the lines — such a loopy lovely word in er handwriting — gives the poem a seven-year-old telling a story vibe. (for the nerds — when the line starts with the same word multiple times in a row, that is called “anaphora”). The rhythmic song never stops, and the “and, and, and…” keeps the story of hope going too.
Okay, Let’s pull back from this formal analysis to remember that it is hope we’re talking about here. What do we learn about hope from this poem?
Feathers are fragile, light, beautiful. Then Hope is fragile, light, and beautiful, right? Hope is wordless, but always singing. This wasn’t Dickinson’s only poem on hope — here are two other first lines for your consideration:
Hope is a subtle glutton
Hope is a strange invention
This poem quickly picks up in the middle stanza — enter the gale, the storm, the violent weather. Hope sings sweetest through the Gale, or in other words, during hard times — we hear hope’s voice the sweeter. I think that we can paraphrase these lines as “hurt people hurt people”:
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird —
That kept so many warm —
Those who would bash your hopes and dreams, the hopes that keep you warm, that never stop singing in your heart, these people, or negative thoughts, are the “sore storms.”
What I step away from in this meditation on hope is that, in these poems, hope is the thing with feathers that never goes away, never eats, and never stops singing — not in the chillest lands, the strangest seas, the strongest winds.
Then, the last stanza returns to the speaker, who imagines hearing hope in life’s foreign moments, when there is a chill and one is a stranger. Hope is a companion who never complains, or asks for recompense.
Yet — never— in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of me.
It ends so neatly in the meter that we think we know what she is saying here. But, many of Dickinson’s poems end with a turn at the end toward strangeness, and we are actually left in ambiguity. No neat little bows here!
Does she mean that hope is a gift of grace that lives in our hearts, whether we feed it or not?
Does she mean that real hope asks for nothing in return?
Does she mean that “hope” is for other people, and not “of me”?"
Is the “it” in the last line still referring to hope — or something else?
Is it true that we cannot lose our little bird called “hope,” even if we do not tend to it? I do not believe this is true, though I wish it were.
Remember “Hope is a subtle glutton”? Here hope “feeds upon the Fair” And yet, when “inspected closely” — “whatsoever is consumed/ the same amount remain.”
I take this to mean that the little fluttering in our chest that feels like hope is an infinite resource. To listen to hope’s song does not cause it to run out. To consume hope is not possible.
Hope
—never stops — at all
And
—never—
asked — of me
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