The word hope is often used in moments of despair, more precisely to lift people out of those moments. For so many, hope is the light at the end of the tunnel, in the moments when it is hard to get back up it is often this ambiguous term that helps them get up. Of course, all words take on several meanings, and there are always different ways someone can interpret a word. However, according to the Oxford Online Dictionary hope is “a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen”(Oxford Dictionaries). More often than not, hope is a feeling rather than something people express verbally. The poems “"Hope" is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson and “Dare I Hope?” by Sophia White both address the term hope. Although …show more content…
Both of the poems that I previously mentioned are focused around interpreting the term hope. As seen in the paragraphs before, it is easy to interpret the word in different ways, and that is precisely what these two poems are doing. Although both poems take their own approach to the word hope and do not share the same structure, there are some consistencies between each author’s interpretation. Both the poems by Sophia White and Emily Dickinson are centered around hope, however, the interpretations are very different, using symbols, metaphors and the structure of the poem to get their points across. The poem ““Hope" is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson begins its first two lines with a metaphor. “That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words”(2-3). These opening lines bring us into the rest of the poem where the author is describing the word hope through the metaphor of a bird. Dickinson continues to use metaphors throughout the poem. Later in the poem, she describes different aspects of hope. “And sore must be the storm/That could abash the little Bird/That kept so many warm”(6-8). This section is referring to difficult times, and telling us that hope does not falter when hardship comes. In this case, hardship is the storm. She follows this by giving the reader a metaphor for where hope can be
Hope is a very powerful thing and the way you handle it can affect you in different ways. Everyone sees and feels hope differently but it is overall a beautiful thing. Throughout the novel Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper, Amari tends to lose hope very often from herself and others but mostly regains it. The novel Copper Sun has a very similar theme to the poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers” because it captures the thought of losing all hope but being able to regain it and never letting go of it just like Copper Sun portrays. Amari is a hopeless soul when she is reminded that her life is not well, she has lost all contact of Besa, her family is all dead, and through her struggle to freedom.
Hope is surprisingly difficult to define and may be expressed in many ways. Overall, I feel that a good definition for hope would be that it is an optimistic and expectant desire that emerges from a stressor. It is a coping mechanism deeply rooted in motivation. It is the opposite of despair and fear as well as the influence that keeps us from succumbing to them. Hope can be identified as a means of perseverance as well as perseverance itself. Hope is the ability to detect even the smallest amount of light in the darkest of places.
What is hope? According to Webster’s Dictionary (Agnes & Laird, 1996), the noun hope is defined as “an optimistic attitude of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one 's life. As a verb, its definitions include: ‘"expect with confidence’" and '"to cherish a desire with anticipation .’”
Hope alone is a life-changing emotion or feeling, it alone can decide someone's fate in a life or death situation in which they have s main say in what happens. For example, in the book we read the Odyssey, there are multiple areas where hopes play a pretty big factor in the story. The Odyssey is a story where a man named Ulysses had to go to war for ten years and had a rough ten-year journey to get back home to his wife, son, family, and friends. He never gave up his hope that he would see his family again and that is the main thing in this essay is to never give up hope.
Hope played a very important role in this book, in the Holocaust, and it even helps many today. Throughout the entire book Eliezer stays hopeful that he will escape or be saved from these camps. Although sometimes he barely had any it was still there, and it was always there. It’s like when you know you’re not going to get something or not good enough to do something, a little part of you always hopes your the one picked even if its totally ridiculous. There was that same little part within Eliezer. This is said in Emily Dickinson’s hope poem as well. The metaphor within it says that the bird which represents hope, continues to sing even when there is no song. This means that hope is always present within us. In the second stanza the bird faces
When faced with an obstacle, most but not all people would not know how to handle or go about it.Everyone tries to look for something to help them get over these obstacles or problems that are blocking their way into success or whatever it is that they are trying to accomplish or reach.Hope is one such common method that is and should be used in beating said obstacles.Such method can be seen in “Blak’s story” by Yanier Franklin Donald Moore and “On Being Seventeen,Bright-And Unable tuse of it, and Raymond dealing with his dyslexia, which he manages to deal with over time.In both “Blak’s story” and “Being 17,Bright-And Unable to Read”,the authors convey hope as being powerful enough in helping one in overcoming their adversities or obstacles
Hope is an extremely valued quality to many people, being able to dream and hope of new situations can keep individuals going. This quality is able to keep people extremely motivated when they are facing incredibly heartbreaking and difficult situations.
Hope to me means that you're not giving up and no matter how hard of difficult something may be, you still carry on. Even though it may seem like it’s the end or it will only continue to get better you continue to follow through by keeping your head up high. It’s important to have hope because without we would all be have very pessimistic thoughts, making it impossible to have dreams, goals, or desires. Hope gives us something to
In the dictionary hope is defined as ‘A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.’ In my own words hope is something everybody needs in order to pull through tough times, it’s something that is needed to survive. I believe that everybody has hope but not everyone can find it and sometimes it can be too late. To say we are never without hope would be true in the sense that everybody does have hope, whether that be unrevealed or exposed. Therefore it doesn’t always necessarily shine during the most difficult conflicts, leaving the prompt restricted. I know within myself that there were times where I almost gave up. My dad was rushed into surgery a year or so ago with a brain tumour, at first the haste of the situation didn’t give me any time to think. There was a high chance of losing him on the operating table and I felt as though I had lost all hope within myself. I knew that I had to find hope so I gave myself time to think, realising that my dad is the strongest person I know and he has never lost a fight in his life, so why would it happen now? I had found my hope in a time of conflict and it helped me get through. The question I continue to ask myself is ‘where would I be at this point in time if I didn’t discover that hope?’ I know of a girl who wasn’t as lucky as I was when it came to finding her inner hope. She lived alone with her single mother and her mother become very ill with cancer.
Before we go into any specifics, let’s talk about what hope is. Hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for certain things to happen within oneself. This, however, is just a definition given in a dictionary which your brain understands. We all know that hope means something much more in our hearts. The hearts of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr. has definitely found the meaning of hope in their hearts.
The feeling of hope is defined as a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen by dictionary.com, however our feeling of hope changes with everyone we meet and every experience we encounter. Reading Behind the Beautiful Forevers was a game-changing experience for my perception of hope, it took away my previous feeling of objectiveness and materialism involved in hope and slid in its place an idea that maybe being hopeful doesn’t require a vision of what of hope may lead to instead that being hopeful itself leads to a brighter outcome. If you could gain anything from reading this roller-coaster of a life-defining experience, I wish at least it changes your perception of how you see hope as a vessel to your desired outcome in life.
One device the authors use to portray hope is symbolism. The first way the song exhibits symbolism is through the tornado and the destruction is causes. Carrie Underwood sings, “The weather man called for a twister / she pray it blow down” (lines 5-6). These lines show that she wants the tornado to come down towards her. It represents the destruction her father has brought her life, but also the hope she has that it will be good for her future. She realizes that while the tornado might destroy everything she owns and knows about her childhood, it will also set her free from her father and the darkness that is bringing her down. Her life is like the storm. Before a storm comes it is dark and dreary outside, much like her life now. After a storm passes the skies clear and a rainbow appears, this is what her life will be like after the tornado passes. The storm takes away all the bad in her life and leaves her with an open path to a brighter future. The second way the authors
Emily Dickinson “took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work” (Poetry Foundation). Although commonly overlooked because of her abstract and abridged writing approaches, Dickinson moved away from traditional ideals by including abnormal capitalization and punctuation to create a unique rhythm and style. She was able to convey powerful messages and ideas, such as death, nature, and hope, that are completely incomprehensible to most people through the use of literary techniques such as metaphors, similes, and imagery. “[Her] power of condensation, the rhythmic hammer of her thoughts, whether in prose or verse, is so phenomenal that it call[ed] for a new system of weights and measures” (Ella Gilbert Ives, Poetry Criticism). Because Dickinson did not get the same support as many other considerable poets of the time, including Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, she, as well as her poems, did not become famous until much after her death in 1886. “Hope” is the thing with feathers proves that the abstract feeling of hope can be explained in order to help people through even the toughest of times and in overcoming
In “Because I could not stop for Death” the speaker of the poem creates an image, “We passed the School/ We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain-/ We passed the Setting Sun-/” (Lines 9-13). Dickinson used those words to create a mood and an image while reading it. It set a very calm and peaceful image, as well as tone. A school full of children is usually associated with laughter and happiness, a field usually correlates with wind blowing and fresh air that is full of calmness, and a setting sun is a sign of peacefulness and closure. Dickinson incorporated those lines to show that the pathway to death is calmer than what most of society thinks. In “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” the speaker includes, “I've heard it in the chilliest land-/ And on the strangest sea/” (9-10). This creates an image of a lifeless and barren land, somewhere where things are not expected often. Dickinson includes this to say that hope is everywhere, even in places where it is not expected to be, it just never reached her. Dickinson used powerful words to emphasize her point of view by creating images in the minds of others. Her goal was to create images that were strong and sent a strong message about death and why hope is not going to reach everyone.
She uses a number of literary devices in the poem. One primary example of the figurative language that she uses is a the personifications do symbolism of hope. A symbol is an image that represents an abstraction. For example, a red rose may represent love, or a stone may represent hardheartedness. In “’Hope Is The Thing With Feathers,” the poet assigns hope the symbol of a ‘thing with feathers,’ more specifically a bird. Even though that, by the end of the poem, readers can definitely conclude that Dickinson used a metaphor by saying ‘hope is a bird,’ she does not make that clear until the very end. The metaphor began as only a “partial one: a ‘thing with feathers’ is not yet a bird, but some sort of object, not easily envisioned and defined only by the fact that it is feathered, that is, winged, capable of flight. It is a transient human experience, one that ‘perches’ in the soul but does not live there. It ‘sings the tune without the words,’ that is, a song in which rational, lexical meaning plays no role, while melody is all. Finally it ‘never stops at all’” (Leiter). The symbolism of saying that hope is a bird assists the reader in having a better understanding of how the virtue of human desire exists in side one’s soul, and is always singing – always alive – even when times get drastic. A bird is used to represent hope since “birds are often viewed as free and self-reliant, or as symbols of spirituality” (Rose and Ruby). The feathered fowl in this poem is “courageous and persevering, for it continues to share its song under even the most difficult conditions” (Rose and Ruby). Providing imagery of a bird also helps one to form connections as to what hope would act like if it were personified as said