Hope: “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson and Hope by Emily Brontë

Deeksha Bhandarkar chose “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson (first published 1891) and Amulya Hiremath chose Hope by Emily Brontë (first published 1846)

Amulya:  Asking the obvious, why hope?

Deeksha:  I don’t have some great story for it but I don’t have a great relationship with hope because whenever I have been hopeful about something, it hasn’t turned out well for me. I don’t hope for anything anymore. I now believe that if you want something, you get it done — you don’t hope someone calls, you just call them.

Amulya:  Yeah, that makes sense on so many levels for me. I feel like we pin so much pressure on hope to turn the events in our favour.

Deeksha: Hope is such a vague and abstract concept for me. It is just safer to not hope and just do the work yourself instead of sitting and hoping.

Amulya:  Yeah, and with hope you will have expectations of a result. Okay so, getting into this, why did you choose the poem?

Deeksha:  Basically, this is the first thing I remembered when I thought of hope. 

Amulya:  Simple. And I chose the other one because it was also written by an Emily and they should just go together for the sake of their names. Pretty uninteresting story this week but the poems themselves compensate.

Deeksha: Okay. So, let’s start.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers

Amulya:  Even though Emily Dickinson is generally seen as this deep, dark poet, here she talks about “Hope” in a pretty positive light. This is one of her early poems and the complex themes she later explored is not yet apparent at this point. She has one metaphor and sticks to it but she has fashioned the poem itself in a very interesting way stylistically, but we will get to that later.

Deeksha:  That is nice because mine almost talks about it in a negative light.

Amulya:  Right, so, we all know Emily Dickinson. She is one of the most famous American poets and most of her poems were actually discovered and published posthumously. She never got to live her fame.

Deeksha:  This coincides with Emily Brontë’s experience too. They never knew how famous they were going to get.

Amulya:  Yeah. So, “Hope” is the thing with feathers is the first line — none of her poems has a title so they go with their first lines. This is a pretty straightforward poem. To put it in a line, she assigns the metaphor of a bird to hope. So, she then goes on to tell how the bird perches in the soul — you can either look at the word “perch” here as a voluntary sign of occupying a place or take it further and question if the soul is actually confining hope. This bird also only sings a tune, you sort of add your own words and shape what form you want hope to take in your life. Her placing the bird in the soul, to me means hope is something that is intrinsic to the human spirit. It’s not something you are taught; you are born with it. To me, it’s an extension of the soul itself.

Deeksha: I agree. Hope is something from within us rather than an external force.

Amulya: She continues into the second stanza now which only talks about how relentless a bird hope is. Its voice is the sweetest amidst a storm. But I like that she does not exclude the fact that there are some storms that even this all-powerful bird can’t weather. Like we do go through periods in life where we feel extremely hopeless and hope does seem diminished. So, she is taking stock that this bird also falters when the storm is exceptionally bad.

Deeksha: Almost saying like that’s okay and one shouldn’t lose “hope”

Amulya: In the final stanza I found it interesting how she is talking in superlatives — she uses chilliest, strangest — I think it speaks about how our human experiences allow us to magnify hope into a superlative. In the darkest of times, hope seems like the biggest thing. Dickinson ends the poem by saying even in the extreme of conditions, the bird hope only asked for a crumb from me. It’s a very nicely behaved bird. But I think this stands for how little we actually need to nurture the soul. Like our very core asks for the most basic of nourishment and it’s this external layer we have that has all the desires and cravings which we have to keep feeding endlessly for momentary satisfaction.

Deeksha: Emily Brontë, as we will see in hers, can’t even find even that little crumb of hope.

Amulya: Before we move on, I quickly want to add in Dickinson’s writing techniques. She was someone who consciously avoided following rules while composing her poems, she wanted to break the conventions at every possible step. So, this poem follows what is known as a ballad rhythm — the first and third lines of every stanza are in iambic tetrameter and second and fourth in iambic trimeter. She almost follows its rules but, in the end, she wilfully switches or diverges from it.

Deeksha: So, she intentionally does it. She knows the techniques.

Amulya: Yeah, she’s like I know how to do it, I can do it, but I won’t do it. And she has a rhyme scheme, but a slant one — she tried to rhyme “soul” with “all” in the first stanza. Like, so close. Also, if you look at the poem, you see she has put a ton of hyphens/m dashes throughout. She is intentionally trying to break the flow of the poem and make readers pause and almost contemplate what they just read before moving on.
This is a tiny poem. Just three stanzas of four lines each. I like to think that its size is representative of the space hope takes in our souls but the number of ways we can interpret it and think about it while applying it to each of our lives is actually correspondent to the size of the impact hope has on us — which is incalculable.

Deeksha: In the other poem, even a whisper of hope could’ve done so much for her, but it didn’t.

Hope

Deeksha: The name of the poem itself is hope. That’s all. I think having a single word as a title helps catch the attention of the readers. Here she is referring to hope as a timid friend. She sort of seems like she is trapped in a situation — physical or mental — and this friend, here hope, is just watching. It reminded me of people just standing and looking at an accident but not doing anything helpful. Like that anger you feel in such a situation is the anger she is reflecting in her lines. The fact that she compares it to a friend could also mean that she did not have friends or someone who could be there for her.

Amulya:  Right.

Deeksha: The fear hope is trying to project is cruel. She is so sad and trapped in this situation which is sucking all her energy. She seems like she is in prison when she uses the word “bars” and this hope is just standing and looking there. She is hoping hope would do something about it but hope just turns her face away and refuses to help for whatever reason.

Amulya: I think I really like this description and most of all the imagery. It’s so striking.

Deeksha:  And then she talks about this false guard. And the thing about it is, you are just blocking that route of anything going in and out just because of your presence. There is actually this thing that can do something to help but this thing that’s supposed to help you is not doing what it should do.
Then she describes how hope was singing when she was weeping. It brings the imagery of someone teasing when you are in pain. Even at that point, if this singing is bringing relief, even that she wants to stop as soon as she realises it’s bringing her some sort of joy. Like I don’t want to give even that amount of joy to her.

Amulya:  Hope almost seems so elusive in her poem here.

Deeksha:  Yeah, and so cruel and cunning. It’s not like she just does not help but she also wants to inflict pain and hurt. As false as she is, she is uncompromising and unrelenting. Like even the last tiny bit of joy was taken from her, even when she has lost that, sadness — which is when you need hope to escape from sorrow — is with you, repenting. This is an imagery I really liked. There is this narrator and all these remains of past joys and past memories have fallen scattered and even sadness is feeling your pain with you.

Amulya:  That’s brilliant writing and brilliant envisioning of the scene.

Deeksha:  She brings in the idea of hope being a whisper and the use of the word whisper shows that it’s the least hope could do for me. Even that would make things so much better for me but at that point, hope stretches its wings and flies to heaven. The problem I have with this is, this imagery looks like she is describing an angel. When for so long all that hope has done is to be a timid friend and hurt her and not be there for her when she should.

Amulya: Yeah, imagine hope, which is supposed to give respite, hurting you.

Deeksha:  Yeah, and you are angry at this but you still send it to heaven. Like why would you want to do that? In the end, she never returns.

Amulya:  Neat.

Deeksha:  I think we will not completely understand this poem until we understand who Emily Brontë is. She has not had a good life. She lost a lot of people at a young age — especially her family. They were sent away to schools and there they lacked hygiene. They lacked the care of their mother also. There was this unsettlement in their life. So, a lot of death and uncertainty around her and you get to see that pain in this poem. Like how much pain can a person handle? When do you stop hoping? This very beautifully explains the journey of giving up on hope. This was taken from the collection ‘Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell’ and this was the only poetry collection that was published when she was alive. Emily Brontë had this gothic life that seeps into her writing. I feel like that was the only channel they all had available to express their sorrow.

Amulya:  Yeah, this makes sense.

Deeksha:  Though I haven’t looked into more of her poetry, I have really really loved Wuthering Heights and the way she becomes one with her sadness and yet makes it beautiful in a way.

Amulya: Wuthering Heights is one beast of a novel. So haunting and layered. Just the craftmanship of it is incredible.

Deeksha: It’s such an emotional journey. I feel like everyone needs to go through the series of emotions you go through when you read it. Like nobody is doing anything good in that novel and I believe that’s what was around her growing up.

Amulya:  Yeah. So, let’s get into comparing these two poems. I think we have some interesting contrasts. The obvious one is the difference in tone. Dickinson is talking about it positively while Brontë has nothing but negative things to say.

Deeksha:  Again, we didn’t choose these two on purpose but somehow ended up with poems that offer both ends of the spectrum.

Amulya:  Yeah! Like the other option I came across for hope was a John Keats poem and it was so long, I was like this is going to be a whole other conversation.

Deeksha:  Keats and his poems that go on and on and on. So, yeah. One is the different perspectives on hope. The second one is that both of them give so much power to hope. Even when you are complaining about it, you are giving it so much power to hurt you or make you happy. Like you are writing a whole poem on it. Its influence on you is obviously great.

Amulya:  Yeah. They’ve both experienced hope on such a personal level — enough to write poems on it. Another thing is, in Dickinson’s poem it is something inherent, a part of her soul; inseparable. But in Brontë’s, she is looking at it externally, as a friend.

Deeksha: Even then I think, she isn’t clear about her relationship with hope and what she feels about it. Like when you are in a toxic relationship with somebody and you are sad that they’re doing it to you, you want it to continue. She compared it to an angel at the end, sort of, shows her religious inclination as well.

Amulya:  Do you think she sees it as something spiritual? Like something beyond herself?

Deeksha:  Yeah, externally as opposed to the other Emily who sees it as something inside her.

Amulya:  I think even though she sees it as a part of her soul, I believe she thinks of it as something spiritually given. Even in Brontë’s, she’s sending it back to heaven. So, I think both of them believe it to be something out of this world, at its core.

Deeksha:  But when they’re saying it’s not from this world, aren’t they saying that there is nothing they can do nothing about it. Like you are given hope, you are given hope, you aren’t given any, you are given hope.

Amulya:  I think she was given hope but she was just given one that misbehaved.

Deeksha:  I think it also has something to do with Brontë only having her family while growing up and very limited exposure to other people. Another important point is how we as humans struggle to perceive abstract concepts like hope without personifying it. In both the poems, we can see how they are trying to understand this intangible entity.

Amulya:  Yeah, they are trying to grapple this concept by giving it some sort of form.

Deeksha:  I just think it’s sad these poets died without knowing how powerful an impact they had on readers. I will forever love and recommend Wuthering Heights to people. There are so many novels, movies, songs based on their work and they never even got the praise they deserved when they were alive.

Amulya: I like to think that they were beyond fame. Like it wouldn’t have mattered to them even when they were alive.

Deeksha: Yeah, clearly. I’m just mad that their contemporary men got it, so why not them. They deserved it.

Amulya: Yeah, they definitely deserved it.

We would love to hear from you! Let us know your thoughts, interpretations and anything in between in the comments below!

ABOUT:

Deeksha Bhandarkar and I met in our MA English class. Both of us sharing Mysuru as our hometown, and Mysuru being the smallest place in the world, we grew up in the same literary backyard — attended the same story-telling sessions on Saturdays, watched the same plays, visited the same bookstores and had a bunch of mutual friends. But it was only in 2021 that our paths finally converged.

Sharing a passion for literature and a curiosity to explore more facets of it outside our postgraduate classrooms, we decided to pick a piece of literature each and swap our choices, having the other person interpret and discuss our pick, with a hope to gain new perspectives on writing we have loved individually.

Bookmarked is an ongoing, weekly series, we hope you enjoy it! Happy reading!