10/3/2020

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson
(1830 – 1886)
a. Private life:
- Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, a
small Calvinist village
- Never married
- Loves nature and found deep
inspiration in the birds, animals, plan,
changing seasons
- Dickinson died of kidney disease in
Amherst, Massachusetts, on May 15, 1886,
at the age of 55

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Emily Dickinson
(1830 – 1886)
b. Career:
- Began writing as a teenager. Her early
influences include Leonard Humphrey,
- She was the principal of Amherst Academy
- Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer
than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were
published during her lifetime.
- Her poems are unique for the era in which she
wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack
titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as
unconventional capitalization and punctuation.
- Due to a discovery by sister Lavinia,
Dickinson's remarkable work was published
after her death.
- Typical works: Hope is the thing with
feathers, Success is counted sweetest, Wild
nights- Wild –nights, so on

The poem “Hope is the Thing with

Feathers”

- Written in 1862, a prolific year for her poetry, one

of nearly 1800 poems she penned during her
lifetime.
- The meaning of the poem: it likens the concept of
hope to a feathered bird that is permanently perched
in the soul of every human. There it sings, never
stopping in its quest to inspire. Hope Is The Thing
With Feathers stands out as a reminder to all - No
matter the circumstances each and every one of us
has, hope is always there to help us out, by singing.

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Stanza 1

“ Hope” is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,

 Hope (inverted commas) => define the word “Hope”

 Feathers are soft and gentle to touch, but strong in flight,
even on tiny birds
 Feathers are made up of complex individual fibres; unity
is strength
 Hope has feathers and it can, like a bird, perch in the
human soul
 Not only is Hope feathery, it can sing
 It sits on a perch and sings the whole time.
 But the song is special as there are no words, no diction
for anyone to understand rationally.
 It's as if Hope is pure song, pure feeling, a deep seated
longing that can take flight at any time.

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Stanza 2

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

 The poetess elucidates the expansive power hope

wields over us. It gets merrier and sweeter as the
storm gets mightier and relentless.
 The poetess deems that no storm can sway hope and
its adamant attitude.
 According
. to the poetess, it would take a deadly
storm of astronomical proportions to flatten the bird
of hope that has kept the ship sailing for most men.
 The first line is unusual in the use of the double dash
- there are two distinct pauses which the reader has
to be careful with.

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 The rhyme scheme is abcb, the second and fourth line

rhyme full
 Note the first mention of the bird in line 7.
 It would take a hellish storm to embarrass or disconce
rt this bird (sore - angry and abash - embarrass) whic
h protects many people from adverse situation.
 Hope is difficult to disturb, even when life seems hard
 2nd stanza - note the additional full rhyme of lines 1 a
nd 3 (heard/bird) which helps tighten the mid section
of the poem and places emphasis on the bird's ability
to sing sweeter.

Stanza 3

I’ve heard it in the chillest land

And on the strangest sea,
Yet never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

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Does the poetess

Line 9-10 want to mention
- The chilliest land ? the specific
places?
- The strangest sea ?

The point is:

- Our hope-bird's song can still be heard even in the worst
of environments, when it seems like the world has gone
cold or when everything seems strange.
- Even when things seem totally awful, hope-bird just
keeps tweeting away and helps us overcome everything.

Line 11-12
- Extremity: the worst hard time.
- A crumb of…: a small amount of ….

Here's one more thing that's great about the

hope-bird:
Even when things are at their worst, it
never asks anything in return. It's just there
to help.

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1. Figurative language

• Metaphor: Hope is the thing with feathers

(bird)
• Personification: Hope perches, sings, asks.
• Alliteration: Strangest sea, the repetition of
“s” sound.
• Symbolism: gale/storm = difficulties; chilliest
land/ strangest sea = situations when one
finds it hard to survive;

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2. Content

Through the poetry “ Hope is the

thing with feathers” , Emily Dickinson
wants us to know that hope is always
there whenever, wherever we are ,
even in the hardest situation. Always
have hope in life.