| saveBookmark("", "", ""); Shopping Cart Checkout Home English ... Dickinson's Poetry : "'Hope' is the thing with feathers..." - Navigate Here - Context Analysis "Success is counted sweetest..." "'Hope' is the thing with feathers..." "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" "The Soul selects her own Society" "A Bird came down the Walk..." "After great pain, a formal feeling comes..." "I died for Beautybut was scarce..." "I heard a Fly buzzwhen I died..." "The Brainis wider than the Sky" Study Questions Quiz Bibliography READ ORIGINAL TEXT: Part II, Section 1 "'Hope' is the thing with feathers..." Summary The speaker describes hope as a bird ("the thing with feathers") that perches in the soul. There, it sings wordlessly and without pause. The song of hope sounds sweetest "in the Gale," and it would require a terrifying storm to ever "abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm." The speaker says that she has heard the bird of hope "in the chillest land / And on the strangest Sea", but never, no matter how extreme the conditions, did it ever ask for a single crumb from her. Form Like almost all of Dickinson's poems, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers..." takes the form of an iambic trimeter that often expands to include a fourth stress at the end of the line (as in "And sings the tune without the words"). Like almost all of her poems, it modifies and breaks up the rhythmic flow with long dashes indicating breaks and pauses ("And never stopsat all"). The stanzas, as in most of Dickinson's lyrics, rhyme loosely in an ABCB scheme, though in this poem there are some incidental carryover rhymes: "words" in line three of the first stanza rhymes with "heard" and "Bird" in the second; "Extremity" rhymes with "Sea" and "Me" in the third stanza, thus, technically conforming to an ABBB rhyme scheme. | |
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