Emily Dickinson, “Hope” is the thing with feathers – (c. 1861)

Emily Dickinson

Born into a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) received some formal education at Amherst Academy and Mary Lyons Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (which became Mount Holyoke College). Dickinson was a famously shy and reclusive person who preferred to remain within her close family circle, though some contemporary scholars have begun to question that characterization. In 1862, she enclosed four poems in a letter to literary critic and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had written a piece in the Atlantic Monthly that included practical advice for young writers. Her letter began, “Mr. Higginson,—Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask. Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude.” Dickinson didn’t sign the letter, but instead enclosed her name on a card inside a smaller envelope. Dickinson wrote more than seventeen hundred poems, but only ten were published in her lifetime.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

5

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—

10

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet, never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.

(c. 1861)