![]() Already we have left behind the concrete realities of the world in favour of abstract ideas (or ideals). And it is direct metaphor rather than simile: ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers’.īut we might also note those quotation marks: Dickinson is talking about not hope but ‘hope’, the idea of hope, the way we talk about it rather than the reality. ![]() ![]() Like Dickinson, Brontë begins her poem by trying to define hope:īrontë’s is far more of a narrative poem with symbolic undertones (we’ve analysed it here), while Dickinson’s is lyrical, focusing on the central metaphor. ![]() We might also mention a poem by her namesake, Emily Brontë (1818-48). We can picture an eagle or a parrot or a crow, but a ‘thing with feathers’? No chance.ĭickinson’s is by no means the only notable poem about hope. ![]() ‘It is as though she begins each general enquiry’, Vendler notes, ‘with the general question, “What sort of thing is this?” and then goes on to categorize it more minutely’.īut there’s something counter-intuitive about a poet whose work is defined by its peculiar and sometimes idiosyncratic attention to detail – describing the snow falling from clouds as being sifted from leaden sieves, for instance, or her wonderfully acute observation of a cat hunting a bird – making such wide and varied use of ‘thing’, a word which is, to borrow Vendler’s adjective, ‘bloodless’. ![]()
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