emily dickinson hope is the thing with feathers meaning

If the robin is a “Gabriel,” he heralds spring:Īnd as the symbol of spring, he also seems to represent the joy of life reborn from “a superior Tree/ Without a single Leaf,” which one must imagine would appear somewhat cross like. Is hardly identifiable as a robin at all, but probably could be identified rather closely with values that Dickinson held quite dear, particularly “Guests of Perspicacity” and the “Sylvan Punctuation” she was unwilling to give up in order to be published. The robin in the opening stanza is clearly identifiable with the robin that inhabits my backyard, but I suspect that the values expressed in the last stanza would be much more valuable to Dickinson than to my backyard inhabitants. Sometimes Dickinson seems to project values onto the robin that, judging from her poetry, she holds dear: Here, of course, it’s God, not Emily, that apparently compares Emily with the robin.

Here the robin typically seems to represent the simple “joy,” the joy of song, which, though now gone, will certainly return with new joys.ĭickinson often seems to identify herself with the robin: I’ve finished reading Emily Dickinson for a while, but I didn’t want to leave without noting what seems to me, though I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else, the importance of the “bird” symbol, or motif, in her poetry, and, in particular, the “robin.” The robin first appears in poem number “5:”

Emily dickinson hope is the thing with feathers meaning