Blog #17

I chose to Hope is a Thing with Feathers for my Emily Dickinson poem after looking through quite a few of them for a couple reasons. First off, I was drawn to this poem by its title because it sounds like it would be interesting, and then when I read it it actually made sense to me. In this poem, Emily Dickinson describes hope as a bird that sits perched in the soul and sings without ever stopping (Dickinson). I thought it was really cool that she compared hope to a bird because it makes things a little easier to understand and makes things a lot more interesting. She talks about how the bird has sang to her in the "chilliest land" and on the "strangest sea" which to me means that in the worst of times she always had hope (Dickinson). Also in this poem it talks about how this little bird has "kept so many warm" which I think means that it has kept people going through the harder times. The last two lines of this poem read "Yet, never, in extremity, it asked a crumb of me" (Dickinson). I think these last two lines mean that hope helped her so much but it never asks for anything in return. I think this is such a cool poem because it is so simple yet it has such a good idea to it. Although I do not think this poem can be directly related to Emerson and Thoreau, they both had hope for similar things. For example, both Emerson and Thoreau were against slavery and hoped for it to end (Wayne). Emily Dickinson's poem is about hope and they had hope so I guess it is similar in that aspect. A few ways that this poem differs from Thoreau and Emerson's philosophies are that a common theme for their writings involves nature or something along those lines and Emily Dickinson's poem includes no reference to nature what so ever.

Wayne, Tiffany K., ed. "Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson." Critical Companion to

Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Critical Companion. New York: Chelsea House

Publishing, 2010. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

Dickinson, Emily. "Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson." Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Web. 07 Mar. 2012.