Hope Is The Thing With Feathers Literary Devices

In Emily Dickinson poem “’Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers” the author uses imagery and rhyming formulate her poem and compare a bird to the abstract concept of hope. She also uses a metaphor, a type of figurative language to further develop her comparison of a bird to hope. Throughout the poem, the imagery of the bird shows us how hope is strong and perseverant. Hope much like a little bird can weather the storm and continue to sing even in the worst conditions. We as readers bring our own meaning to this poem and use our own life experiences to understand the message that Dickinson is conveying in her poem. I myself have struggled the feeling of hopelessness so to me lines in the poem might convey a different meaning than it would for someone who has never lost hope. The first stanza of Dickinson poem sets up the metaphor of hope being a bird that is resting in your soul. The first line of the poem comes right out and delivers the metaphor when Dickinson writes “’Hope is the thing with feathers.” This image of hope is fabricated by feathers representing opportunities for new beginnings because feathers enable birds to fly away just like hope enables us to create new beginnings. The third and fourth line of this poem are; “And sings the tune without the words-/And never

The dashes which are seen throughout all the stanzas of the poem cause the reader to slow down and stress the ending of each line. With the line “And sweetest-in the Gale-is heard-“ the dashes causes stress on the idea of Gale and how it affects the way the bird’s song is heard. The poem also has slant rhyme which is evident when in the first stanza the word “words” is later; in stanza two, rhymed with the word “heard and “bird.” Again in stanza three Dickinson produces another slant rhyme by rhyming “sea,” “me” and “Extremity.” These rhymes help the poem to be more lyrical and flow