Summary
The speaker describes hope as a bird (“the thing with
feathers”) that perches in the soul. There, it sings wordlessly
and without pause. The song of hope sounds sweetest “in the Gale,”
and it would require a terrifying storm to ever “abash the little
Bird / That kept so many warm.” The speaker says that she has heard
the bird of hope “in the chillest land— / And on the strangest Sea—”,
but never, no matter how extreme the conditions, did it ever ask
for a single crumb from her.
Form
Like almost all of Dickinson’s poems, “ ‘Hope’ is the
thing with feathers—...” takes the form of an iambic trimeter that
often expands to include a fourth stress at the end of the line
(as in “And sings the tune without the words—”). Like almost all
of her poems, it modifies and breaks up the rhythmic flow with long
dashes indicating breaks and pauses (“And never stops—at all—”).
The stanzas, as in most of Dickinson’s lyrics, rhyme loosely in
an ABCB scheme, though in this poem there are some incidental carryover
rhymes: “words” in line three of the first stanza rhymes with “heard”
and “Bird” in the second; “Extremity” rhymes with “Sea” and “Me”
in the third stanza, thus, technically conforming to an ABBB rhyme
scheme.
Commentary
This simple, metaphorical description of hope as a bird
singing in the soul is another example of Dickinson’s homiletic
style, derived from Psalms and religious hymns. Dickinson introduces
her metaphor in the first two lines (“ ‘Hope’ is the thing with
feathers— / That perches in the soul—”), then develops it throughout
the poem by telling what the bird does (sing), how it reacts to
hardship (it is unabashed in the storm), where it can be found (everywhere,
from “chillest land” to “strangest Sea”), and what it asks for itself
(nothing, not even a single crumb). Though written after “Success
is counted sweetest,” this is still an early poem for Dickinson, and
neither her language nor her themes here are as complicated and
explosive as they would become in her more mature work from the
mid-1860s.
Still, we find a few of the verbal shocks that so characterize Dickinson’s
mature style: the use of “abash,” for instance, to describe the
storm’s potential effect on the bird, wrenches the reader back to
the reality behind the pretty metaphor; while a singing bird cannot
exactly be “abashed,” the word describes the effect of the storm—or
a more general hardship—upon the speaker’s hopes.
