Hope is the thing with feathers

To start off my set of blogs for this last month, I felt it best if I were to open up with a look into some poetry, looking at Emily Dickinson’s, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, a poet whose works I have not yet explored to the greatest extent but after reading through the poem felt it necessary to attempt to entail a few of Dickinson’s key elements within her work. As the title would suggest, Dickinson’s work is an extended metaphor, made clear by the opening lines of the work, which say, “"Hope" is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words And never stops—at all”. It does not take much analysis to reveal how Dickinson is using the extended metaphor of the bird to provide a visual and somewhat audial representation of hope, an idea which in it of itself transcends beyond the pages and be just as easily applicable to our own lives as any other time in history. The image of a bird being a symbol of hope could also be interpreted as a biblical allusion to Noah in Genesis, where following the great flood that lasted 40 days and nights, Noah sent out both a dove and a raven to determine if the waters had receded enough for landing, “When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth” (Genesis 8:11). Just like in Dickinson’s work, the dove of Noah served as a visual symbol that the greatest challenges that we face in this life can only be countered by the hope of there being an end to troubles and there being something better. It is more than just an emotion, but as Dickinson states, it becomes a personal embodiment in a person’s very soul, able to bring them out of whatever darkness or despair they may have been lost in and allow them to live again and, like Noah, know that there is rest for the wearied heart. But hope is not something that everyone wishes existed, as made evident by the second stanza, “And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—And sore must be the storm That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm”. No matter how different some of the most powerful “storms” across history have been, most all of them have the same goal of crushing hope because they know of its potency. Such is the true underlying reason for the brutality of various regimes and dictatorships over time, wishing that people could only see the raven that never returned, never to know of the dove that brought back the olive branch of life. The power of hope is something “that kept so many warm” as Dickinson put it, telling of how powerful hope truly is. In this way, hope can be seen as being like a fire, fueling and giving strength to those who go to it, and also serving as a beacon of light to guide the way. For all that hope does for people, Dickinson’s final stanza serves as a reminder of hope’s greatest attribute: it’s selflessness. She writes, “I've heard it in the chillest land And on the strangest Sea Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb—of Me”. Hope is something that is given in complete selflessness, never asking for sort of reparations, only wishing to see the fruits of its labor multiply. President Snow of The Hunger Games put it best by saying, “Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear”.