"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers

Emily Dickinson is a seminal poet in American literature. Dickinson lived most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and rarely left her home. Despite Dickinson’s reclusion, her unique engagement with ideas of hope, death, and identity have made her renowned the world over.

Dickinson’s verse is idiosyncratic and difficult to classify. Dickinson expresses interest in American Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Romantic understanding of the natural world (the Romantic imagination celebrated humanity’s relationship to nature as a near-divine source of enlightenment), but these interests are difficult to see in her poetry. Instead, many of Dickinson’s poems fit into an older tradition of religious writing and are more influenced by hymns and psalms than by contemporary poetry.

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” exemplifies Dickinson’s idiosyncratic verse and use of religious forms. It is one of Dickinson’s many poems that explore the concept of hope through a metaphorical incarnation—in this case, as a bird. The poem was originally published in 1891, five years after Dickinson’s death. Like most of her poems, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” was untitled at the time of Dickinson’s death, and the poem is identified by its first line. Thomas H. Johnson assigns the poem the number 254 in his 1955 edition, and R. W. Franklin assigns 314. Each editor numbers the poems in the order they judge to be chronological.

Poet Biography

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. Dickinson attended the Amherst Academy as a youth. She later studied for 10 months between 1846 and 1847 at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley. Dickinson was part of a well-connected family in Amherst and, in her early life, often made social calls on her family’s behalf. Dickinson also attended the local Calvinist church after a 1845 religious revival in Amherst but stopped attending by 1852 when she was in her early twenties. Though Dickinson only formally attended church for a few years, and expressed religious skepticism, the form and content of her poetry is influenced by religious hymns and psalms.

In the mid-1850s, Dickinson’s mother became chronically ill. During this time, Dickinson took care of her mother and their home. Though Dickinson still kept in contact with friends through correspondence, she was nervous about leaving her sick mother, and she rarely left the house. Dickinson seemed to enjoy isolation, however, and confined herself to her family home even after her mother passed away in 1882. By this time, Dickinson was well known in the community as a recluse. Few people saw Dickinson in the last 15 years of her life. A famous myth—since disproved by her poetry but nevertheless apposite to her unconventional character—is that during these later years, she only wore white, a color usually reserved for funerals at the time.

Dickinson’s reclusive lifestyle means that her poems and letters do not necessarily reflect larger world events. Dickinson’s poems, for instance, do not comment on the Civil War (1861-1865). The poems are also not indicative of contemporary American literature. Only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published by the time she died in 1886, and those 10 were heavily revised to fit poetic conventions. A selected anthology of similarly revised versions of Dickinson’s poems appeared in 1890. In 1955, a complete set of Dickinson’s poetry was published, retaining all the idiosyncrasies of her original manuscripts.

Poem Text

“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.

Dickinson, Emily. “'Hope’ Is the Thing with Feathers,” 1891. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Dickinson’s poem is a conceptual exploration of hope. The poem’s speaker opens with the declarative statement that “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” (Line 1). This statement begins an extended metaphor where “Hope” is suggested to be a bird. The speaker, however, does not make the equation directly. Instead, they suggest the comparison in pieces and at times are ambiguous. First, they call “‘Hope’ [...] the thing with feathers.” (Line 1) While it may not be clear what “thing with feathers” (Line 1) is, the second line’s use of the word “perches” (Line 2) potentially clarifies that the speaker is talking about a bird. This bird, the speaker imagines, “perches in the soul” (Line 2) instead of on branches and “sings the tune without the words” (Line 3). At the end of the first stanza, the speaker maintains that the bird’s song “never stops – at all” (Line 4).

Much like the bird’s song, the final line of the first stanza carries on into the second stanza. They call the bird’s song “sweetest” (Line 5) and suggest that even “in the Gale” (Line 5) the song is still “heard” (Line 5). The speaker then imagines a “sore [...] storm – / That could abash the little Bird” (Lines 6-7). The storm is only hypothetical, and the speaker quickly moves on to express the bird’s ability to keep “so many warm” (Line 8). This sustained warmth suggests that the bird has outlasted many storms. With the use of the phrase “so many” (Line 8), the speaker also articulates that the bird represents hope in a pluralistic, abstract sense.

In the final stanza, the speaker contrasts the warmth that ended the second stanza with “the chillest land” (Line 9). The speaker returns to the bird’s song and states that they still hear the wordless tune in both this “chillest land” (Line 9) and “on the strangest Sea” (Line 10). This quick survey of foreign locales implies that, just as the bird’s song “never stops” (Line 4), the bird also never leaves the speaker’s soul. Given the metaphor established in the first line between “Hope” (Line 1) and the bird, it can be assumed that the speaker is also saying, in this final stanza, that hope has never left them. This assumption is partly confirmed by Line 11, where the speaker states that the bird has also been with them “in Extremity” (Line 11), or in remote locations. Finally, the speaker states that “Hope” (Line 1), or the bird, has “never [...] asked a crumb - of me” (Line 11-12). This final line implies that the bird is self-sustaining and does not require anything of the soul it “perches in” (Line 2).