Tuesday, March 4, 2008
I read Emily Dickison's "Hope is a Thing with Feathers"(http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/hope.html). The poem is about the emotion of hope and comparing it to a small bird, which in literary terms is called allteration;"Hope is a thing with feathers/That perches in the soul" (lines 1 and 2). The first stanza states that hope lives inside the human sole and although it doesn't tell one what to do, it guides one's conscience in a benefical way. The second stanza states that it would take a lot of bad occurances or something really tramatic to shatter this hope that dwells in the human soul, and how it provides solice for so many people; "And sore must be the storm/ That could abash the little bird/ That kept so many warm"(lines 6-8). The last stanza says that no matter what the situation, there is always hope, and it doesn't ask for anything back, although it gives much; "Yet, never, in extremity,/It asked a crumb of me" (lines 11-12).
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BA #5
As I read over this post, the explanation of each stanza and their meanings is slightly too "cut and dry," but still pretty accurate. The first thing that stood out to me was that this comparison of hope to small bird is a metaphor, when alliteration is a repetition of sound. Though it was a small mistake, it was definitely confusing. In my opinion, this metaphor is also a form of personification. Though hope is not being referred to as a person, it is being brought from an intangible emotion, to a creature full of life. Though this poem is fairly self-explanatory, something I thought of after reading it was that there is an implied metaphor by saying that hope "perches in the soul" (line 2). This can be interpreted as saying that hope perches in the soul like a bird perches in the tree. If hope is like a bird, then it is also saying that the soul is like a tree. It is difficult to tell if the metaphor is a deliberate comparison, but if so, one can say that the soul is a living entity, as much as it is a medium for emotion. It lives, and grows, and can die without care, much like a tree does. This implied metaphor may not be intended, but it makes for an interesting thought.
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