Hope is the Thing

“Hope” is the thing with feathers. Emily Dickinson penned this famous line and poem at the time when both she and her nation faced a lot of fear and darkness. I thought Dickinson was pretty basic for a long time. Probably because she rhymed, and I found rhyme poetry a bit adolescent. And she wrote about death, so I also thought she was trying too hard to be emo or something. In my troubled, close-minded opinion, Dickinson’s simple verse in its neat lines and rhymes just couldn’t possibly understand my real struggles or my real life.

I recently read Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson for a course I took during the final summer of my Middlebury grad program. That text brings beautiful context and relevance to Dickinson’s poetry. That, in addition to the brilliant series Dickinson, starring Hailee Steinfeld as Emily, gave me a new appreciation and understanding of the power in her seemingly simple poetry.

I think that Dickinson recognized the dueling power and insufficiency of language as a representative of the human experience. Though many of her poems supply easily memorizable recitations for even children to master, they also contain meaning much deeper than the still waters of the words who stand as the glistening surface for the depths of emotion and experience you find when you immerse yourself in them.

“Hope is the thing with feathers” is one of those poems I initially hated because I didn’t understand it. How could she liken hope, this great abstract, to a mere bird and call it a day? This enmity I held for her poem stemmed from ignorance both of the poem and of the concept of hope itself. I didn’t get the poem, and I didn’t get hope.

For most of my life, I thought hope was something you employed to wish for good things. I hope we have ice cream for dessert. I hope my crush likes me too. I hope I find a four leaf clover. I hope it will be OK. I just never questioned the concept of hope because I never had a good reason to.

Earlier this year I was reading The Pocket Pema Chodron. This book was lent to me by a recovery counselor who thought it might be of interest to me; it’s a collection of various writings by Pema from her publications on a milieu of topics, and one of them was titled “Abandon Hope”. This one stuck with me, because I’d never encountered this kind of sentiment before. In desperate situations, people are always encouraging you to have hope. I’d never been told to just let go of hope completely. Pema’s angle on this “abandon hope” idea was that hope, like fear, was rooted in thinking about the future rather than the present, which makes sense. All the things I’d ever hoped for were things that hadn’t yet come to fruition. I still wasn’t sure if I should abandon it, but I understood the concept of sitting more mindfully in the present rather than anticipating the future. The phrase “abandon hope” stuck with me in the way that unresolved thoughts often do.

At a meeting I recently attended, the speaker picked hope as the topic for sharing. This got me thinking even more about the concept of hope in a way I hadn’t before. What was it exactly? Identifying this abstract form wasn’t easy for me, and I spent the majority of the meeting swimming laps in my mind trying to get to the center of the matter. How could I abandon hope and yet celebrate hope in my life at the same time? How does hope even come about in the first place? This was my dilemma; and when I finally considered Dickinson’s poem days later, my maze began to look a bit more like a map.

Here’s her poem in its entirety.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That 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 storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That 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.

The extended metaphor of hope as a bird reminds me of this recent time I was sitting outside The Thinking Cup with a coffee. I was thinking of something (as is fitting at this particular cafe) - perhaps my latest crisis or what the next right step could possibly be - when a little bird hopped over to the chair next to me. I just watched it for a bit, thought about reaching for my phone to take a picture and didn’t. I considered that the motion might frighten it off, so I just sat with myself and the bird and engaged in its company in that way. I didn’t think of this poem at that time, but I can see a connection now.

Hope, like the bird, is a gift. We don’t just summon hope, and hope isn’t a self-born desire. We receive hope sometimes when we least expect it, and all we can do is let it in without trying to own or manipulate it into our own plans and desires. Maybe abandoning hope doesn’t mean completely dismissing the possibility of hope in our lives, but letting go of our tendency to bend hope to our own wills.

Hope is a gift, and ought to be received and experienced as such. Think of situations in which you experienced hope, real hope, not just a wish. When the Celtics face a playoff elimination after losing two games and being down in game three, we can wish for a win, but we don’t have hope unless it’s given to us when we see the team begin to really flow with each other, start dominating possession of the ball and scoring more frequently than the opposing team. Then there is hope that something is changing and that they have it in them to turn the game and the series around. It’s easy to get swept up in the emotion of a playoff game and make it about us, latching onto that hope and turning it into a desire or a need. That can lead us to feel ownership over something that’s not ours to control, which explains the violence and devastation some fans do experience in the wake of a favorite team’s loss.

Hope comes with a big unknown that makes it something less sure and solid than a simple desire. Hope and fear have this sort of yin-yang relationship; they come as a package deal and are one and the same when seen in the right light. Pema Chodron writes that the Tibetan word for hope is rewa-, and fear is dokpa-; re-dok, a combination of the two, is the more commonly used word in the language because the feeling we try to capture with our language contains more than just hope or fear alone.

Fear too is a thing with feathers. It’s not something we can control, though we’d like to, and it’s something we’d like to avoid. We can let both fear and hope dominate our lives when we try to grasp at it. Maybe that's what Dickinson’s final couple lines echoes - hope asks nothing of us; neither does fear. Not even in extremity - or in the most intense, hope-filled or fear-dominated situations. When I try to manipulate the outcome of something I have hope in, I am relying on myself and the outcome I view as the only right end. When I try to dissipate or avoid the fear I experience, I am not relying on God and trusting in what I can learn from this fear or how I can grow.

If we look at the occasion with the bird at The Thinking Cup, if I’d reached out for the bird like I would hope, I would have either scared it to flight or held it in my grip. Either way ruins the essence of hope. In one situation I’ve turned hope from a gift into a possession I’ve grabbed for myself. I risk hurting the bird, damaging whatever trajectory our paths were meant to take, and feeling I’ve lost something at the same time as I took possession of it. Snow White doesn’t grab at the birds who surround her while she sings. She (and a good number of other Disney princesses), just sings and lets them do their bird thing, enjoying their presence and letting them land on her hand if they choose to. I’m not a Disney princess, so my bird flitted off to other business, but that’s for the best since I have a mild fear of birds touching me.

What I’m trying to say here is that letting the birds be means letting things beyond our control - things that bring hope or fear or both - be beyond our control. Abandoning hope doesn’t mean despairing or sinking into passivity; it means letting things be while we continue to do our best and change the things we can to be better.