Hope Is The Thing With Feathers By Emily Dickinson And...

The word hope is often used in moments of despair, more precisely to lift people out of those moments. For so many, hope is the light at the end of the tunnel, in the moments when it is hard to get back up it is often this ambiguous term that helps them get up. Of course, all words take on several meanings, and there are always different ways someone can interpret a word. However, according to the Oxford Online Dictionary hope is â€Å"a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen†(Oxford Dictionaries). More often than not, hope is a feeling rather than something people express verbally. The poems â€Å"Hope is the thing with feathers† by Emily Dickinson and â€Å"Dare I Hope?† by Sophia White both address the term hope. Although†¦show more content†¦Both of the poems that I previously mentioned are focused around interpreting the term hope. As seen in the paragraphs before, it is easy to interpret the word in different ways, and t hat is precisely what these two poems are doing. Although both poems take their own approach to the word hope and do not share the same structure, there are some consistencies between each author’s interpretation. Both the poems by Sophia White and Emily Dickinson are centered around hope, however, the interpretations are very different, using symbols, metaphors and the structure of the poem to get their points across. The poem â€Å"â€Å"Hope is the thing with feathers† by Emily Dickinson begins its first two lines with a metaphor. â€Å"That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words†(2-3). These opening lines bring us into the rest of the poem where the author is describing the word hope through the metaphor of a bird. Dickinson continues to use metaphors throughout the poem. Later in the poem, she describes different aspects of hope. â€Å"And sore must be the storm/That could abash the little Bird/That kept so many warm†(6-8). This section is referring to difficult times, and telling us that hope does not falter when hardship comes. In this case, hardship is the storm. She follows this by giving the reader a metaphor for where hope can be