Hope Is The Thing With Feathers By Emily Dickinson

The extended metaphor of Emily Dickinson’s, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” utilizes personification to express what hope is to the speaker. The speaker thinks highly of hope and expresses this feeling through imagery and metaphor. The addition of personal pronouns and personality into the last stanza provides pathos in the poem and aids in solidifying the power of hope. Hope remains in the darkest times of life and its effect on humanity explained by the speaker through the use of personification, metaphor, and imagery.

It starts with "God gave a loaf to every bird, but just a Crumb to me." These first two lines are illustrating that God gave every person everything, except for her. Emily Dickinson uses bird to illustrate the human like attributes. While this poem goes on the next line says "I dare not eat it, though I starve, my poignant luxury. "

Scott F. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, along with a poem “Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson, and poem “Are you the new person drawn toward me?” by Walt Whitman convey how hope and hard work can change a person’s fate, but uncertainty in life can outweigh previous hope and hard work,eventually ruins one’s fate.

In the first stanza, "Hope is the Thing with Feathers," Dickinson has made use of metaphorical bird image to explain the conceptual idea of hope (Dickinson & McNeil 2002). Hope is not a conscious thing, it is lifeless, but by offering hope feathers, the poet creates an image in people's minds. The feathers imagery invokes hope they represent hope as feathers enable a person to fly and give the picture of flying away to another new hope and a new dawn. In disparity, broken feathers and wrecked wing grounds an individual and symbolizes the image of a poor person who has gone through difficult life challenges. The experiences results to their wings being broken making them loose the power to have hope for the future.

I started my project with Dickinson’s poem in order to relate the connotation that many have of birds to my topic. This poem portrays the resilience of hope and its effect on the people through the form of a little bird, one that asks nothing in return for its light. In my presentation I addressed how this fact is true for everyone, as their hopes

“Hope is the thing with feathers, which perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all…” Emily Dickson. Both Dickson and Ellis believe that hope can always find its way into anything and that once hope lights up inside of someone, it never fades. The theme of hope is dramatized in this novel by the use of inspirational leaders, symbolism and the process of never giving up hope for the people you love.

Although “Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes and “Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson are two completely different poems, in my opinion there is a type of connection between them. Dreaming is one thing and having hope is another, although in some circumstances they may also have the same meaning. Dreaming of something is like having hope towards an idea that may happen in the future. In the poem “Dream Deferred” Hughes questions us by asking a variety of questions supporting the idea of what would happen to a dream deferred.

There are other symbols within the poem as well, the “Gale and Storm” symbolize the challenges we face. These challenges may weaken the bird momentarily but hope prevails and continues on and on. In the last stanza, the use of symbolism continues with, “in the chilliest land, And on the strangest sea”. These are used to symbolize life’s worst conditions and yet hope is still there and is everlasting. The final symbol used is within the line “Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb of me.” Dickinson refers to the crumb because she is suggesting that hope has never asked for anything in return, not even the smallest

Even before we were assigned to read Emily Dickinson’s poems, I already was familiar with some of them. Of the ones I had previously read and out of the ones read for HON 211, the most unforgettable is her poem known as Hope is the Think with Feather:

Dickinson and Whitman also use similar poetic devices in "Hope is a Thing with Feathers” and “O Captain! My Captain!” Each poem contains an extended metaphor. In Dickinson’s poem, a bird clearly symbolizes hope. The first stanza introduces the bird metaphor: ‘Hope is the thing with feathers--/That perches in the soul.’ The next lines ‘And sings the tune without the words--/And never stops—at all—’ illustrate the interminable nature of the bird and hope. The second stanza expands the metaphor by saying ‘And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—.’ The bird’s song, or hope, is the sweetest during a Gale, or troubled times. The first lines in the final stanza ‘I’ve heard it in the chillest land--/ And on the strangest Sea’ describe the bird, or hope, as being

The poem opens with the line “Hope is the thing with feather. “ In this

In “Hope is the thing with feathers” the author characterizes hope as being caring and always being there when it's needed, which helps develop the theme of hope and perseverance. The following line, “And never stops at all”, helps characterize the bird in the poem as persevering. This piece of evidence shows that hope will always be there which characterization of caring. The line “That perches in soul”, gives the characterization of perseverance. This line is portraying the idea of hope always being with you, hence the line perching within you, or in your soul. The line “And sour must be the storm that could abash the little bird” characterizes hope as persevering. The line illustrates the bird as always being there even when times are tough. Even when one might think that there is no hope, hope will always be there. The quote “Yet never in extremity it asked a crumb-of me” characterize hope as being giving.The line shows how hope will never ask for anything in return and instead gives without expecting anything in return.

Hope is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson. In the poem, Emily is using the bird as a metaphor to show that hope will live on forever

In Emily Dickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ is a thing with feathers,” Dickinson argues that the power of hope is derived from its unwavering ability to comfort us even in the darkest circumstances. Dickinson does this by drawing on an extended metaphor of comparing hope to the resiliency of a small singing bird. In this essay, I will analyze the relationship between the bird’s actions and its capabilities and what this implies about Dickinson’s idea of hope. This comparison suggests that even though hope is seen by some as a delicate thing, it is actually a powerful force that drives humanity and never asks for anything in return.

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” is a well known poem by Emily Dickinson, with its title, as with all of her poems, coming from the first line. However, had Dickinson given her poem a title, she may have chosen something quite different and less cheerful for her title. Though, at first glance, this poem seems upbeat and happy with its catchy rhyme scheme and seemingly lighthearted extended metaphor, the theme of the piece is much darker and more cynical. Instead of speaking joyfully about this feeling of hope, the speaker observes it from an outside standpoint, implying that the speaker is devoid of the hope she describes.