Hope is the thing

HOPE IS THE THING

The subject of the poem is hope, that is compared to a bird. Hope can be found everywhere, even in the most dangerous storm you can hear the feeble sound of the tune of the bird of hope. Hope is a thing with feathers, it's sweetest

The poem is made of three stanzas of four lines, that is three quatrains. It hasn't got a precise rhyme scheme, but there are some rhymes: "heard"-"bird" on lines 5 and 7, "storm" and "warm" on lines 6 and 8, "sea" and "me" on lines 10 and 12. We can say that only the second stanza has got a precise rhyme scheme, with alternate rhymes. Most of the words are monosyllabic words, and this creates an effect of shortness, the poem goes on more quickly. There is an important alliteration on line 6 between "sore" and "storm": these two words reinforces their meaning each other, since they give the impression of something violent. Moreover there are two examples of anaphora: the repetition of "and" at the beginning of the third, fourth, fifth and sixth line and the repetition of "what" on the seventh and eighth line.

Even if the syntax and the general comprehension is simple, however the words aren't so easy to translate, they're not words used in everyday language. Besides the words are evocative, that is they refer to other images as regards the images given by those words. Finally the words are mostly concrete. There is a prevalence of nouns, the adjectives are few, and this makes the poem clearer and easier to understand, because it gives us concrete images instead of abstract and complicate ideas.

Metaphor:

At first she says that hope is a feathered thing, and only in the second stanza she compares hope to a bird. This may be because the poetess want us to imagine this image of a "thing with feathers", that could be a dove, the symbol of hope, but then she doesn't precise what is this "thing with feathers", she only says that it's a bird.

The storm stands for all our concerns, our worries. The land and the sea could stand for all the strange situations in which we need hope. Both the metaphors are about something unpleasant, adverse, and hope can solve them in a positive way, even if it is only a feeble sound.

In this poem, the poetess has a downbeat approach to nature: in fact, in her opinion, all the forces of the nature are against our hope, they try to destroy our personal defences leaving us armless.