Close Reading of Hope is a thing with feathers

Emily Dickinson was an exceptional writer through the mid-late 1800’s. She never published any of her writings and it wasn’t until after her death that they were even discovered. The complexity of understanding her poems is made prevalent because of the fact that she, the author, cannot expound on what her writing meant. This causes others to have to speculate and decide for themselves the meaning of any of her poems. There are several ways that people can interpret Emily Dickinson’s poems; readers often give their opinion on which of her poems present human understanding as something boundless and unlimited or something small and limited, and people always speculate Dickinson’s view of the individual self.

Approaching Emily Dickinson’s poetry as one large body of work can be an intimidating and overwhelming task. There are obvious themes and images that recur throughout, but with such variation that seeking out any sense of intention or order can feel impossible. When the poems are viewed in the groupings Dickinson gave many of them, however, possible structures are easier to find. In Fascicle 17, for instance, Dickinson embarks upon a journey toward confidence in her own little world. She begins the fascicle writing about her fear of the natural universe, but invokes the unknowable and religious as a means of overcoming that fear throughout her life and ends with a contextualization of herself within

<br>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 everywhere. The last lines ‘Yet, never, in Extremity,/It asked a crumb—of Me ' show the unselfish nature of the bird; hope never asks for anything in return. "O Captain! My Captain!" contains a more complicated and cryptic extended metaphor. Basically, Abraham Lincoln captains the metaphorical ship of the United States through the Civil War. The second line ‘The ship has weather 'd every rack, the prize we sought is won ' means the United States survived the tribulation of the Civil War, and the citizens won the prize they sought, unity. Abraham Lincoln

Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest female poets to ever live. She left us with many poems that show us her secluded world and life. Like other major nineteenth-century authors, Dickinson used her hesitations between doubt and faith to make amazing works of literature that will remain popular for many years to come. The style of her first writings was mainly conventional, but after years and years of practice she began to leave some room for experiments. Often written the same way that hymns are, her poems dealt with not only issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the strengths and limitations of language. Emily’s faith is clearly seen in her poems 155, 342, and 508.

Known as one of America’s best poets, Emily Dickson poetic style sets her apart from all the rest. Every writer has his/her own unique ways based on theme, style, and punctuation special just to him/her; this is the same of Ms. Dickinson.

It shows the flexibility we have with nature. “Hope is the thing with feathers”, she uses the birds to stand for hope. This is one of the poems that Dickinson writes that uses personification and does not offer grief. Dickinson’s poems offer a lot of insight into her work

In the poem “ Hope Is The Thing With Feathers” by Emily Dickinson establish a metaphors of hope through a bird. Hope is thinking for the author as a bird that continues to grow inside her. Even though she expresses her dark times, hope gives her some motivations to face it. In this poem Dickinson symbolizes bird as hope, in which she describes hope as something anybody can touch. The author uses iambic trimeter rhythm with and extra syllable in the first and third lines of each stanza and also repetitions.

The thing about hope is, nobody knows where it comes from. The author really wants to make the reader think about hope and where it comes into play in your life, in the poem he uses to bird to get his message across. Also, the author uses imagery to help understand the story. He uses the storm, for instance, to show how bad things have to get before you really have to use hope in life. He uses this to show us how things can feel when you’ve had a bad day or you’re just down in the dumps.

In the poem it says "that perches in the soul" (2). No bird can perch on the soul so this shows that the bird is not a a physical bird but a imaginary bird. Also from the quote we can see that hope is always with us. In the sentence our soul is like a branch and the bird is hope. "And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard" (5). In that quote when it talks about the sweetest-is heard, it is referring to the birds song of hope. When it talks about the gale it is referring to the storms that we experience. In this poem in talks about how hope having the qualities of a bird that can't be

Emily Dickinson was a famous American poet whose work was published in the late 19th century. Her writing style was seen by many as unconventional due to her use of “dashes and syntactical fragments”(81), which was edited out by her original publishers. These fragmented statements and dashes were added to emphasize certain lines and subjects to accentuate the theme of her poems. Emily Dickinson wrote descriptive, moving poems on death, religion, and love. Her poems continue to create gripping discussions among scholars on the meaning behind her words.

Emily Dickinson a modern romantic writer, whose poems considered imaginative and natural, but also dark as she uses death as the main theme many times in her writings. She made the death look natural and painless since she wanted the reader to look for what after death and not be stuck in that single moment. In her poems imagination play a big role as it sets the ground for everything to unfold in a magical way. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. She turned increasingly to this style that came to define her writing. The poems are rich in aphorism and dense

She uses a number of literary devices in the poem. One primary example of the figurative language that she uses is a the personifications do symbolism of hope. A symbol is an image that represents an abstraction. For example, a red rose may represent love, or a stone may represent hardheartedness. In “’Hope Is The Thing With Feathers,” the poet assigns hope the symbol of a ‘thing with feathers,’ more specifically a bird. Even though that, by the end of the poem, readers can definitely conclude that Dickinson used a metaphor by saying ‘hope is a bird,’ she does not make that clear until the very end. The metaphor began as only a “partial one: a ‘thing with feathers’ is not yet a bird, but some sort of object, not easily envisioned and defined only by the fact that it is feathered, that is, winged, capable of flight. It is a transient human experience, one that ‘perches’ in the soul but does not live there. It ‘sings the tune without the words,’ that is, a song in which rational, lexical meaning plays no role, while melody is all. Finally it ‘never stops at all’” (Leiter). The symbolism of saying that hope is a bird assists the reader in having a better understanding of how the virtue of human desire exists in side one’s soul, and is always singing – always alive – even when times get drastic. A bird is used to represent hope since “birds are often viewed as free and self-reliant, or as symbols of spirituality” (Rose and Ruby). The feathered fowl in this poem is “courageous and persevering, for it continues to share its song under even the most difficult conditions” (Rose and Ruby). Providing imagery of a bird also helps one to form connections as to what hope would act like if it were personified as said

Emily Dickinson was one of the many famous American poets whose work was published in the 19th century. Her writing style was seen as unconventional due to her use of “dashes and syntactical fragments”(81), which was later edited out by her original publishers. These fragmented statements and dashes were added to give emphasis to certain lines and subjects to get her point across. Even though Emily Dickinson was thought to be a recluse, she wrote descriptive, moving poems on death, religion, and love. Her poems continue to create gripping discussions among scholars on the meaning behind her poems.

Perhaps one of the aspects that draw us to the poetry of Dickinson is its eccentricity and startling nature. In her poetry, Emily Dickinson explores a number of different themes including death, hope, nature, pain and love. The trademark signs of a Dickinson poem are her hallmark dashes she uses. Her dashes suggest that there is more to the story than she is writing down. Another characteristic of Dickinson’s poetry is the capitalization of random words throughout her poems. This could suggest importance of the words that she is highlighting. A large number of Dickinson’s poetry revolves around the theme of death; both psychological and physical. She makes the reader question what

Writer’s convey their opinions through many different techniques. Within Emily Dickinson’s poems, she implements the use of “random” capitalization, dashes, rhythm, and consistent formation. By using these techniques, Dickinson conveys the importance of clarity and being understood.