How Figurative Language Used In Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

Improved Essays
The poem “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” by Emily Dickinson is a metaphoric poem

meaning about life and its struggles. The theme of the poem is hope. The tone of the poem is

optimism and hopefulness. The author uses the figurative language of metaphor and

personification to express the theme of hope.

One type of figurative language used in the poem “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” is

metaphor. The author uses metaphor to express the theme of hope. She shows hope and its

meaning to her in own her words. Some might ask, why a bird. Why not a butterfly, or a horse?

They are just as graceful. Why? Because it is the simple beauty of a bird that to us symbols life a

prosperity. And as she quotes "Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    1. Ray Bradeburry wrote Dandelion Wine because it almost seems like it goes through the moments of his life. It explains imagination, almost as if your a 12 year old reading the book and how children think about things differently than adults. He uses dandelions throughout the book as a continuous metaphor, so he also wrote the book to be a continuous metaphor so it would be more interesting. 2.…

    • 154 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    With them wishing for this all the time they don’t enjoy the life they still have and appreciate what they had before, for they see this little four year old girl with the same sight as them at their elder age. The second theme is seen with the little girl remaining happy all the time and even at the age of four, almost five she remains happy. "The gas wore off, she found the hole in her face / (you know, it never bled?), / stayed happy, even when I went to pieces." ("Through a Glass Eye, Lightly" 28-30). With those verses it tells how a little girl was able to remain happy even though her eye was removed, and how the narrator was bothered by their eye removal with great emotion.…

    • 922 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Metaphors: “Their eyes as brilliant and as wide as the night”, “Their manes the leaping ire of the wind”. These metaphors convey the etherealness of the atmosphere at that point of time. The poet uses these metaphors to once again compare simple objects with mysterious, eerie elements, suggestive of a dark night ahead. He uses these metaphors as a medium to chill the reader, and make the reader believe that something sinister has been going on in the poem. 12.…

    • 659 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    The poem and the story develop the same themes but they come across to a person in different ways. In the story a hobo gets help from a man but later doesn't appreciate it. The story starts off when a man comes along to a hobo who hasn't slept for two days and hasn't eaten for three days. The man offers to take him out to pick and find him a place to sleep. The homeless guy starts out eating with great manners, but then he starts to get ungrateful because he feels the man is just using him and just trying to learn about him.…

    • 573 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Makenzie Meacham Miss Rutkowski English 102 Spring 2016 Hopelessly Hopeful Loss is an inevitable experience we all encounter. For some, loss will define who we are forever after. For most of us, at least, it allows us insight to our own mentality. Diving deep into our emotions is an essential part of human life, however, the solitude in our dark minds leaves us feeling alone.…

    • 1949 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    There will be a time in everyone’s life in which they feel surrounded by confusion and tragedy. Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream” is a widely known lyrical poem surrounding the thoughts of a speaker whose seemingly dashed hopes and dreams have led him to question the very meaning and purpose of life. Through the emotionally-charged words spoken by the speaker, the powerful imagery and subtle symbolism, the use of apostrophe, and the juxtaposition created between the two parallel stanzas of the poem, Poe eventually reveals the poem’s skeptical and regretful theme: many elements of a person’s life, specifically the passing of time, are ultimately out of one’s control, and any and all good things which a person experiences must ultimately come to an end.…

    • 1263 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Richard WIlbur’s “The Juggler”, the poem describes a seemingly mesmerizing performance by a juggler. The narrator, who appears to be among the audience uses poetic elements such as imagery, figurative language, and tone to reveal his fascination and inspiration evoked by the juggler’s performance. Imagery was proven to be one of the most prominent poetic elements within the poem, emphasizing its importance in the revelation of the speaker’s change. At the beginning of the poem, in stanzas one and two, the imagery was much different from the rest of the poem. The imagery appeared to be much weaker, and did not excite the reader as much as it had later in the poem.…

    • 638 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The right words The stone lion (Wild and Voutila, 2014) begins and ends with the lion being a statue in front of the library. The journey taken through the beginning and the end of the story allow the readers to feel, dream, imagine and think about feelings of the lion and the feelings that he encounters. Margaret Wild and Rita Voutila allow the readers to embark on the same journey through the use of emotive language and pictures throughout the story. Humans are able to gain the information though the use of their senses, sight and sound (Tunnell, 2008).…

    • 1027 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Nadiya Tate Mrs.Roper 2nd period March 8 2017 Out of the dust By Karen Hesse In the book out of the dust billie jo struggling to find relief after the death of her mother. She feels abandoned, worthless after the situation.…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    She described the peacock and how it appeared, making it an image of the Savior Jesus Christ. Another image that she used is the priest’s care toward the Guizacs family as Christ like. Flannery O’Connor used Irony to support her purpose in the story. At the beginning of the story, she begins to introduce a displaced person from Portland.…

    • 685 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe was written over 150 years ago and the diction is a little hard to understand. It is titled The Raven because the poem is about a raven, but the raven doesn’t show up for a while so it keeps the reader interested throughout the poem and constantly wondering about the bird such as where it comes from and what it represents. This poem contains a lot of rhythmic rhyming. The speaker is emotional and the tone is intense. As the events of the poem grow more intense, the words and the rhythm of the poem pick up too.…

    • 901 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One of Edgar Allen Poe’s poems, “ The Raven” has a very dark reflection on death, hope, and the lost of his beloved, Lenore. As the narrator recites the poem you can feel his emotion as they intensifies throughout the poem, especially with the raven that shows up at his window. He tries to forget about his unhappiness and sorrow by reading variety old books, which turns out to be no help. A raven shows up and intrudes on his loneliness; nevertheless the raven is representing evil and death. The narrator is attempting to motivate you to see the raven as his own misery and his far approaching morality.…

    • 973 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Similar features can be found in stanza seven, from line 46 to line 54. After undergoing the funeral procession, the reader is now faced with a speaker that wants to spread “roses and early lilies” (Whitman, 50) to the dead. He had broken off a sprig of lilac in the dooryard of his home, already, in stanza three and put it onto the Lincoln’s coffin, in stanza six. Thereby the speaker links the sprig and the dead and helps to evokes hope in the reader and himself. Flowers, also the sprig, symbolize growth.…

    • 842 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Within this essay, two poems will be discussed and compared to distinguish which of these poems would be considered the most powerful at portraying the theme of the realities of was. The chosen poems, Freedoms Horror was written in 2010 by James Clark and Dulce et Decorum Est was written in 1917 by Wilfred Owen. The theme of both poems is the realities of war. These poems are among the thousands of other poems that are categorized as war poetry.…

    • 1160 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A poem exhibiting an extended metaphor clarifies the two objects that are being compared by using figurative language and other writing techniques. “Nature,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, is an example of this type of poem as it compares mother nature and a human mother as caretakers of humanity. Through explicating this poem, it is easy to see the theme that death is inevitable and that nature brings people to rest just as a mother leads her child to bed after a long day; Longfellow uses figurative language, attitude, and a Petrarchan style sonnet to show the comparison between how nature and mothers nurture their “children” in different ways. “Nature” depicts the nurturing side of mother nature and of human nature and shows the indecisiveness…

    • 1045 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays