Dickinson

I appreciated the poem at the beginning of your e-mail! I’ve read a little bit of Dickinson before, in a poetry class here, and I even tried to write a poem like one of hers – although it definitely wasn’t one of my best. My favorite poem here was definitely the last one, “Hope.” I loved the image of the bird; I loved the first line, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It just made it seem so delicate. And that the image of the bird to allude to hope is something that is probably overdone at the this point, reminded me of something we talked about in class on Wednesday – that things may seem overdone now, but at the time of their creation, they were fresh and new. (This also relates to your Adaptations class!)

I liked this poem best because it speaks to how I’ve always felt; yes, there are times when I feel like I have no hope, but it keeps coming back. It “[…] sings the tune – without the words/And never stops at all” (lines 3 & 4). I could quote the whole poem; I just really like how she portrays hope as this thing that can’t be beaten, and I really like that she says, “Yet never, in extremity,/It asked a crumb of me (11-12). It’s true; you don’t have to do anything to have it. It’s just kind of inside you. If you want to believe in yourself, or hope for your dreams, it’s going to be there – maybe in spite of what you’re thinking; you can say that you give up on something, but if you wait things out, you’ll find a reason to have hope again. This actually reminds me of a quote that I put in one of my journal entries (that I found in my assignment book): “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”