Emily Dickinson’s Inspirational Poem on Hope

"Hope is a thing with feathers" by Rick and Brenda Beerhorst. Rick&Brenda Beerhorst/CC BY-SA 2.0

When life’s tempests overwhelm the heart, what enables us to endure? How do we keep going? The 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson addressed this question in a poem called “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”

There are many reasons that Dickinson needed to cultivate hope. She was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and attended one year of college. Later in life, Dickinson famously became a hermit on her family’s homestead, shunning interactions with others. Some have attributed this to mental illness.

Scholars disagree about whether her reclusiveness was because of her desire to focus on her poetry or some medical condition. Either way, she developed strange habits during her mid-20s: She ran away from the doorbell, struggled to visit with friends, and spoke to the visitors she did have from behind a closed door. Eventually, she maintained most of her friendships through written correspondence only.

"Emily Elizabeth, Austin, and Lavinia Dickinson," circa 1840, by Otis Allen Bullard. Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass. Public Domain

She also experienced the deaths of many loved ones, suffered from a painful eye illness, and never married, although she may have had romantic feelings for Judge Otis Phillips Lord, who died in 1884. Lonely Dickinson died from heart failure in 1886. She was relatively young, just 55.

Dickinson was a sensitive, eccentric, reserved, and acutely introspective woman whose full inner life was revealed only after her death when her family discovered her 40 handmade books containing 1,800 poems. The poems in these journals released the voice of an unconventional poet with intense powers of observation, a deep preoccupation with philosophical and mystical matters (especially death), and an utterly distinctive use of syntax and punctuation. Only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime.

Dickinson’s genius was fully recognized by critics only after her death. The Poetry Foundation has called her “one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time.”

On Hope

Dickinson’s poem about hope is built around an extended metaphor that compares hope to a bird:

“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.

For most readers, the first thing that will arrest their attention in this piece is the unusual punctuation. Dickinson’s frequent use of dashes create constant pauses, hesitations, almost, where what remains unsaid is as important as what is said. She allows white space to radiate out, and whole realms of meaning are suggested, merely hinted at. Her poetry occupies a threshold between the known and unknown, between this world and the other.

In this poem, the punctuation allows Dickinson to emphasize key words and causes us to reflect on them in the spaces between. The quotation marks around “Hope” set it apart from the rest of the poem and identify it as a concept to be defined, although also as something a bit foreign—just as we might put a word from another language in quotation marks. Throughout the poem, hope holds a mysterious, wondrous status. Where does it come from? Where does it derive its strength and endurance from? Another instance of punctuation used for emphasis comes with the dashes surrounding “at all.” These make us pause on these words, reinforcing the idea of hope’s perpetuity, even in the face of “the Gale,” another key word that receives emphasis by means of dashes and capitalization.

In the first stanza, the speaker establishes the central metaphor, giving hope feathers and a perch within every human soul—in the likeness of a bird. Dickinson enjoyed studying nature, so this metaphor would have come readily to mind for her. The speaker develops the metaphor by giving this bird of hope a song, albeit a wordless one.

There are no words in this song to be rationally understood—it’s something that transcends reason. As poet Andrew Spacey notes, “It’s as if Hope is pure song, pure feeling, a deep-seated longing that can take flight at any time.” Further, the final line of the stanza makes clear that this wordless song of the soul endures for evermore.

If the first stanza emphasizes hope’s universal extension through time, the second stanza focuses on its universality of place and circumstance. No storm can quiet hope’s song. In fact, it grows “sweetest” when things are at their worst, when life becomes a storm. “And sore must be the storm - / That could abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm.”

These lines remind us of the vast multitudes who are sustained by hope; it occupies a place in every human heart, at least in potentiality, for those who are willing to offer it a nest there and listen to its quiet song under the roar of the storm.

The scattered rhymes in this stanza and throughout the poem (word/bird/heard, sea/me) are like the echoes of the bird’s song, resonating through the poem, half-hidden in confusion or chaos. For those with ears to hear, the song is still there.

In the final stanza, the speaker uses the first-person pronoun “I” for the first time. In this way, these abstract reflections on hope become more personal and concrete. The speaker refers to “the chilliest land” and “strangest Sea,” which are metaphorical rather than literal places. They are aspects of the soul’s internal landscape and the journey of life.

Dickinson understood the realm of mind and spirit in terms of an “undiscovered continent,” accessible only to the individual. The unknown regions of the human soul offered endlessly fascinating vistas for poetic exploration. This spiritual landscape—as we all know—can contain strange seas and chilly lands and storms. But through it all, hope, embodied in the bird, sings its sweet song unrelentingly. And as this stanza makes clear, the bird is immortal without needing to be fed: It asks nothing of us. “Yet - never - in Extremity, / It asked a crumb - of me.”

A restored 1848 daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, a foundational American poet. PD-US

Hope’s presence is virtually inexplicable in some circumstances. Sometimes, the maintenance of hope seems foolish, yet history and experience reveal how often hoping against hope is ultimately rewarded. Dickinson’s poem is the sort of poem you pull out in moments of discouragement to remind yourself of the gift of hope which can sustain us—as perhaps it sustained Dickinson herself—through all winds of change.

What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]