Poems: Second Series (1891), c. 1861
Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;And sore must be the stormThat could abash the little birdThat kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,And on the strangest sea;Yet, never, in extremity,It asked a crumb of me.
Emily Dickinson wrote this around 1861, in Amherst, Massachusetts, and never published it. It appeared in Poems: Second Series in 1891, five years after her death, in the edition prepared by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson — the editors who gave it the title Hope, smoothed her dashes into ordinary punctuation and tidied her capitals. The poem you read on this page is that 1891 text, which is the one in the public domain and the one most people have met.
The whole poem is one metaphor held to the end without ever being explained. Hope is not like a bird; it is the thing with feathers, and from there everything follows literally — it perches, it sings, it is heard in the gale, it keeps so many warm. Twelve lines, three stanzas, and not one line that steps outside the figure to tell you what it means.
The last stanza is where it turns hard. The bird has sung in the strangest sea and the chillest land, and in all that extremity it never asked anything of the speaker — a crumb. What looks like a poem in praise of hope ends by noticing how little hope ever demanded, and how much it did on nothing.