My Chosen Poem

"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.

Dickinson defines hope by comparing it to a bird. The bird metaphor is only defining hope. Whatever is being said of the bird applies to hope, and the application to hope is Dickinson's point in this poem.

The bird "sings." and it makes us question a lot of things from the poem. The tune is "without words." it might tell us that hope is a matter of words, or its a feeling about the future, a feeling which consists both of desire and expectation. she might mean that hope may never fail us, and it will always be here.Feathers represent hope because feathers enable you to fly and offer the image of flying away to a new hope, a new beginning. In contrast, broken feathers or a broken wing grounds a person.

"That perches in the soul," Dickinson continues to use the imagery of a bird to describe hope. Hope, she is implying, perches in our soul. The soul is the home for hope. It can also be seen as a metaphor. Hope rests in our soul the way a bird rests on its perch. Also, the use of “abash,” for example,is used to describe the storm’s potential effect on the bird, it pulls the reader back to the reality behind the metaphor; while a singing bird cannot exactly be “abashed,” the word describes the effect of the storm or a more general hardship upon the speaker’s hopes.