Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the…

These lines open a short poem of three stanzas. Hope is a bird that lives in the soul and sings, without words and without pause. The second stanza says its song is sweetest “in the gale”, and only a terrible storm could “abash the little bird / That kept so many warm”. The last says the poet has heard it “in the chillest land, / And on the strangest sea”, yet never, even in extremity, has it asked her for a crumb.

The poem rests on one image, held to the end: hope asks nothing and gives everything. A tune “without the words” suggests something deeper than arguments, a confidence that survives when there is nothing left to say.

Dickinson wrote the poem around 1861, in Amherst; only a handful of her nearly 1,800 poems were printed in her lifetime. After her death in 1886, her sister Lavinia found them, and Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson edited selections. This one appeared in 1891, titled “Hope” by the editors, with her dashes smoothed away.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers (Poems: Second Series), first stanza, 1891

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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