Um, I have to start today's deep dive with a
bit of a confession. And, uh, I might get some
hate mail for this, but I just have to be honest
with you all. Oh boy, that sounds ominous. What
did you do? Well, it's not what I did. It's,
uh, it's what I feel. Whenever I walk into a
bookstore or, you know, a library gift shop,
and I see a coffee mug with the phrase, hope
is the thing with feathers written on it. Oh,
I think I know where this is going. My immediate
reaction is to just roll my eyes. Skepticism.
For Emily Dickinson, that is a really bold stance
to take right out of the gate. It's not skepticism
about her talent. I mean, she's brilliant. It's
the context. It's become kind of the live, laugh,
love of American literature. Right. It's on tote
bags. It's on magnets. It's on those little inspirational
posters in guidance counselors' offices. It just
feels so, I don't know, safe. Like an embroidery
sampler. Exactly. It feels like the literary
equivalent of a warm cup of herbal tea that doesn't
really taste like anything. Well, that is actually
the perfect setup for what we're doing today.
Because if you sit down with the source material,
and for this deep dive we are heavily pulling
from the Wikipedia analysis of the poem, along
with its publishing history and literary mechanics,
you realize that safe is the absolute last word
you should use to describe it. See, that's the
part I really struggle to believe. Because on
the surface, it's a poem about a little bird.
It's about hope. It feels very greeting card.
That's the trick, though. That is the genius
of Emily Dickinson. She is an absolute master
of disguise. What do you mean by disguise? She
takes a concept that feels soft and sentimental
on the surface, and she packs it into a structure
that is mechanically aggressive. weirdly punctuated,
and logically very rigorous. If you look at the
closed transcription, meaning the version she
actually wrote and not the one usually printed
on the mugs, it's a completely different animal.
Okay, so our mission today for the listener is
basically to rescue this poem from the gift shop.
Exactly. We're going to look at the physical
artifact, the actual paper it was written on,
which tells a pretty wild story about how she
quote unquote published. We'll break down the
hymn meter she used and why it might actually
be a parody. And we have to talk about the dashes.
The aggressive punctuation. The aggressive punctuation.
Let's start with why you think it's a greeting
card poem. Because for a really long time, the
world didn't even know this poem existed. That
was the part of the background info that really
surprised me. Because I assumed this was just
published in The Atlantic or something during
her life and everyone clapped. But the source
says it wasn't published until 1891. Right. Years
after she died. During her lifetime, Dickinson
was basically a ghost to the literary world.
She didn't publish in the traditional sense at
all. But, and this is a really key point, she
did. publish. She just did it for an audience
of one. You're talking about the fascicles? Yes,
specifically fascicle 13. I love this detail
so much. Can we paint the picture for the listener?
Because fascicle sounds like a medical term,
like maybe something to do with a muscle, but
it's actually really craft core. It is. It really
is. So imagine this. It's roughly 1861. The American
Civil War is ramping up and you have Emily Dickinson
in her room in Amherst, Massachusetts. She takes
sheets of cream colored stationery. Specifically
woven stationery. The source mentioned it has
blue rule lines on it, right? Kind of like notebook
paper. Blue rule lines, yeah. And a watermark.
It's actually embossed with a queen's head above
the letter L. So this wasn't just scrap paper
she found lying around. Not at all. She sat down,
wrote out fair copies of her poems, including
Hope is the Thing with Feathers, stacked the
sheets, poked holes in the spine, and hand -sewed
them together with thread. That's the image that
sticks with me. Yeah. The needle and thread.
It's just so deliberate. She wasn't stuffing
poems in a drawer because she was shy or insecure.
She was binding her own books. Yeah. There were
40 of these booklets found after she died. And
Fascal 13 contained this poem along with there's
a certain slant of light, which is just a powerhouse
collection. Yeah. But think about the psychology
of that. You aren't submitting to an editor.
You aren't waiting for anyone's approval. You
are curating your own legacy, physically binding
it together and then just putting it in a chest.
It feels incredibly modern, actually. It's like
making a zine or having a private blog that you
treat with total seriousness. But then her sister
finds them. Lavinia Dickinson found them. And
can you imagine the shock? You think you know
your sister, and then you find hundreds of masterpieces
sewn together in her dresser. But here is where
the greeting card problem you mentioned really
starts. Because the version Lavinia found isn't
exactly the version the world eventually got.
No. The first editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, they looked at these
poems and thought, whoa, this is messy. The punctuation
was weird. The capitalization was inconsistent.
It just looked raw. So for the 1891 publication,
they quote unquote fixed it. They smoothed her
out. They gentrified the poem. They took out
all the jagged edges to make it palatable for
a 19th century audience. They essentially turned
a wild thing into a tame bird. It really wasn't
until 1955 when Thomas H. Johnson released the
scholarly edition and later R .W. Franklin that
we finally got to see the poem as it existed
in fascicle 13. OK, so let's look at that unsmooth
version. Let's look at the mechanics, because
if we strip away the nice font and the editor's
polish. What are we actually looking at? We are
looking at a definition. That is the actual genre
of the poem. She is trying to define an abstract
concept, hope, by describing its physical properties.
Hope is the thing with feathers. Exactly. Notice
she doesn't say hope is a bird. Right. She says
it's the thing with feathers. It's a small distinction,
but it really matters. Bird is a category. Thing
with feathers is an observation. It's almost
like she's looking inside her own soul, sees
this creature, and is describing the texture
of it first. It feels alien, like an undiscovered
species. And it perches in the soul. That's the
roost. It lives inside. But the next line is
the one that destroys the whole greeting card
vibe for me and sings the tune without the words.
And never stops at all. Focus on without the
words for a second. What does that tell you about
hope? Well, it implies that hope isn't logical.
It's not a speech. You don't talk yourself into
hope with a pro and con list. Exactly. It's non
-linguistic. It's a vibration. If you have to
use words to convince yourself to be hopeful,
you probably aren't actually hopeful. You're
just optimistic. Oh, that's an interesting distinction.
Optimism is a cognitive process. You look at
the data and say things will probably work out.
But hope is deeper. It's that biological drive
that keeps you going even when your brain, the
part that uses words, is telling you. to give
up. That actually makes total sense of the never
stops line. Because if it were a logical argument,
it would stop when the argument failed. If the
facts change, the logic stops. But a song can
just loop. It's a continuous loop. It's a constant
background frequency. And that brings us to the
second stanza where she tests this frequency.
She essentially puts the bird in a wind tunnel.
This is the gale. And sweetest in the gale is
heard. I've always read this as just, you know,
hope is good when things are bad. Which is a
bit of a platitude, right? Like, look for the
silver lining. It definitely sounds like one
if you read it quickly. But look at the mechanics
of the sentence. The song is sweetest in the
gale. Why? Contrast. Contrast, yes. But also
necessity. Think about it. You don't notice the
hum of your refrigerator until the house is completely
silent. You don't notice the thing with feathers
when you're happy and safe. Right. The gale.
The storm, the crisis strips away everything
else. All the other comforts are gone. The logic
is gone. The plan is gone. And what's left? Just
that little hum. She uses the word sore to describe
the storm too, which I found really interesting
in the source. And sore must be the storm that
could abash the little bird. Abash is such a
great vocabulary word. It means to embarrass
or to confuse or to silence. So the storm has
to be incredibly painful, sore, to finally shut
the bird up. Right. It implies that the bird
is actually really tough. We usually think of
feathers as fragile. We think of birds as hollow
boned, delicate things that you have to protect.
But Dickinson is totally reversing that. The
storm is huge and violent, but the bird is resilient.
Exactly. It takes a cataclysmic event to kill
hope. It turns the cute little bird into this
absolute tank of a creature. It's small, but
it's nearly invincible. And then in the third
stanza, she expands the map. She says, I've heard
it in the chillest land and on the strangest
sea. Chillest land and strangest sea. She's talking
about internal geography here, right? She's not
talking about Antarctica. Almost certainly. These
are the edges of the human psyche. Depression,
grief, severe alienation. The strangest sea is
that feeling when you just don't recognize yourself
or the world around you. And the bird is there
too. It's an explorer. And this leads to what
I think is the most important part of the poem.
The economic argument. The transaction. Or rather,
the lack of one. Yet never in extremity, it asked
a crumb of me. This is the absolute kicker. Extremity.
That's the crisis point. That's when you are
at your absolute limit. In most relationships,
in most transactions, when you are in a crisis,
you have to pay up. You have to expend energy
to fix things. You have to barter. But the bird
asks for nothing. Not a single crumb. It is a
non -transactional virtue. And this is a really
profound insight from the source material. Notice
the distinction between me and it. The speaker
isn't the bird. Correct. The speaker is the host.
The bird is a separate entity. It's a wild creature
that has taken up residence in the soul. It doesn't
work for you. It doesn't obey you. It just lives
there. And it sings regardless of whether you
feed it or not. That actually feels terrifyingly
independent. It's not I am hopeful. It's hope
is happening to me. Precisely. It entirely shifts
the agency. If hope is something you do, then
it's your fault if you lose it, you failed. But
if hope is a wild bird that perches in you, well,
that's a gift. A gift you can't control, but
also a gift you don't have to earn. OK, I am
definitely starting to see why this is deeper
than a tote bag slogan. The tote bag implies
just be hopeful. The poem actually says there
is a wild thing living in you that will survive
the storm. Exactly. But I want to pivot to how
this thing sounds because we mentioned the gift
shop version is smoothed out. But even the original
has a very catchy, very simple rhythm. It really
bounces. Oh, it's incredibly catchy. It's a total
earworm. The source calls it ballad meter or
hymn meter. Right. If you've ever been to a Protestant
church or really any church in the 19th century,
this rhythm is in your DNA. It's alternating
lines of four beats and three beats. Iambic to
trameter followed by iambic trameter. It's Amazing
Grace. It is exactly Amazing Grace. Amazing Grace,
how sweet the sound. Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul. And I have to bring
this up because the notes mentioned it and I
actually tried it before we started recording.
It's also the theme song to Gilligan's Island.
It is the exact same mathematical structure.
You can sing this poem perfectly to the tune
of Gilligan's Island. The minnow would be lost.
The minnow would be lost. So why did she do that?
Was she just copying what she heard in church
from people like Isaac Watts or Phoebe Hinsdale
Brown? Or is there something more subversive
happening here? Because Dickinson wasn't exactly
a traditional churchgoer. This is where the scholarship
gets really juicy. There's a scholar named Victoria
N. Morgan who argues that this isn't just homage
or copying, it's parody, or at least a reassessment.
How so? What is she reassessing? Think about
what hymns are actually for. They are for communal
worship. They are for dogma. They are for organized
religion. God is great. Follow the rules. Here
is the doctrine. Dickinson takes that structure,
that very rigid, churchy container, and she fills
it with something wild. She fills it with the
bird. Right. She's using the church's rhythm
to describe a spirituality that has absolutely
nothing to do with the church. The bird doesn't
ask for tithes. It doesn't ask for prayers. It
doesn't ask for a crumb. It just is. So she's
subverting the form to reclaim the concept of
hope from 19th century Christian dogma and make
it incredibly personal. That's a Trojan horse
strategy. It sounds like a hymn, so you let it
in. Yeah. But once it's inside your head, you
realize it's rewriting the theology. Exactly.
It uses the familiar to deliver the radical.
And she disrupts that hymn feeling visually,
too. We have to talk about the dashes. The dashes.
If you look at the Wikipedia page for the poem,
specifically the transcription section, it's
just full of them. Lines don't end with periods.
They end with these long horizontal lines. Nine
lines end with dashes. For a long time, early
critics just thought she was messy or that she
literally didn't know how to use a comma. They
thought it was just scratch notes. But modern
scholars have a very different take on that.
Yes. Scholar Ina Youm has this beautiful description.
She says the dashes create visible breath. Visible
breath. What does that mean for the listener?
Try reading the poem aloud with the dashes. You
can't read it smoothly. You can't just chant
it like a zombie in a pew. Hope is the thing
with feathers. That perches in the soul. You
have to stop. You have to hesitate. You have
to gasp almost. It creates a caesura, a pause.
It breaks the rhythm. It makes the poem sound
urgent, almost breathless. Like the bird is hopping.
Fluttering around. Or like the speaker is physically
overwhelmed by the feeling. It takes that smooth
Gilligan's Island rhythm and makes it jagged.
It makes it staccato. It forces you to pay attention
to each individual phrase. It basically stops
it from becoming a lullaby. She does that with
capitalization too, right? Hope is capitalized.
Bird is capitalized. Extremity is capitalized.
Right. In German, you capitalize all nouns, but
in English, you usually only capitalize proper
nouns like names or places. By capitalizing extremity,
she's turning a situation into a place. You aren't
just in a bad mood. You are in the land of extremity.
And hope isn't just a noun. It's a name. It's
an entity. It's a full character. There's one
more technical detail that I thought was super
nerdy, but really changes how you hear the first
line. The reversed foot. Ah, yes. Helen Vendler's
observation. This is brilliant. So normal iambic
meter is da -d -u -m. Soft. Loud. The thing is
da -d -u -m. But the poem starts with the word
hope. And you don't say hope. You say hope. Right.
You hit it hard. That's a trochee. D -U -M. She
reverses the rhythm on the very first word. She
doesn't ease you into the poem. She bangs the
gong immediately. Hope is the thing. It's like
a really startling entrance. It is. It arrests
your attention. It's another reason why this
isn't just a sweet little nursery rhyme. It's
mechanically designed to grab you by the collar.
It pushes you off balance right from the first
syllable. So we have this complex, subversive,
mechanically intricate poem. And yet the critics,
the source mentioned, that despite all this,
some people still call it... Simple. It's the
curse of accessibility. Because the metaphor
works so well, hope equals bird, it's easy to
get it and move on. Some critics called it childlike
in its simplicity. They think the quatrains are
too tidy. They think because it's not overtly
confusing, it's not deep. But Helen Bendler disagrees
with that. Strongly. Bendler argues that the
simplicity is a trap, or rather, a delivery mechanism.
She calls them teasing riddles. If the poem were
incredibly obscure and used massive Latin words,
you'd analyze it with your brain. But because
it uses simple words and a nursery rhyme rhythm,
it slips right past your defenses. It hits you
emotionally before you can even analyze it intellectually.
Exactly. It completely bypasses the gatekeeper.
And the proof is in the pudding. Look at the
legacy section of the source material. This poem
is everywhere. It's been set to music by choirs.
Susan LaBar, Christopher Tinn, it's a massive
staple in choral music. And not just choirs.
The notes mentioned an alt country band too.
Trailer Bride. They named their final album,
Hope is a Thing, with feathers. It totally crosses
genres. You've got highbrow, classical composers,
and alternative country bands both looking at
this text and saying, yes, that's it. That is
the exact feeling. It speaks to the universality
of the storm. and the universality of the resilience.
I think that's why it endures so well. We all
know what it feels like to be in the chillest
land. We all know what it feels like when the
logic runs out. And we all recognize that strange,
illogical thing that keeps singing anyway. So
we've gone from a hand -sewn booklet hidden in
a drawer in 1861 to a global anthem. We've unpacked
the bird, the gale, the hymn meter, and the visible
breath of the dashes. We have. And I think we've
successfully argued that while it might look
nice on a tote bag, it is doing a lot more heavy
lifting than a simple slogan. It's a machine
for resilience. A machine for resilience. I really
like that description. Before we wrap up, though,
I want to leave you, the listener, with a final
thought to mull over. Something that wasn't explicitly
spelled out in the poem, but is heavily implied
by everything we've discussed today. Go for it.
The source noted that Dickinson often used birds
to describe acts of worship. And we've established
that this bird is completely separate from the
speaker. It asks for no crumb. It operates entirely
independently. Right. It's not a pet. It's a
wild animal. So here's the question for you to
think about. If hope is this wild, independent
creature that lives in us, but doesn't answer
to us, Does that mean we've been thinking about
hope wrong this whole time? We usually talk about
practicing hope or trying to be hopeful. Like
it's a muscle we have to flex or a daily chore
we have to do. Exactly. But Dickinson seems to
be suggesting that hope isn't something we do.
It's something we host. It's a habitat we provide.
Wow, that changes everything. It means that when
you're in the deepest depression and you can't
quote unquote do anything, the bird might still
be there. You don't have to power it. You just
have to let it perch. Just let it perch. Something
to think about the next time you find yourself
in a gale. Thanks for taking this deep dive with
us. See you next time.