Readings · Poems
Hope is the thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson · 12 lines
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
About this reading
Emily Dickinson died in 1886, and this poem was first printed five years later, in the second collection of her work, which T. W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd edited for Roberts Brothers of Boston. Hope is drawn as a small bird that sings in the soul, is heard most sweetly in the gale, and asks nothing.
The Second Series text, first printed in 1891; the copy read here is its printing of 1892. Its editors titled the poem Hope, and printed no quotation marks around the first word. Her own manuscripts kept almost no punctuation but dashes, and capitalized important words, as this book's preface says.
- First published
- 1891
- Text from
- Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series (Boston, 1892)
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