Re-creating hope

In his book Wonderworks, Angus Fletcher recalls what Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about poetic language, how it "rearranges usual speech in order 'to re-create.'" Put another way, poets force us to stop and think.

Fletcher uses the example of a poet writing "a flower blue" instead of the more normal "a blue flower." Merely by rearranging words, the poet makes us pause a split second to picture that "flower blue" in our minds.

Emily Dickinson

Lately I have been thinking about Emily Dickinson's wonderful short poem about hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,/And sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all.

She might have written, "Hope is like a bird," but "the thing with feathers" stops us in our tracks. It is what most people remember about this poem.

Dickinson changed the way we think about hope. Birds don't normally come when you call them. They perch where they will. And this bird flies into our soul, each of our souls, perches and stays there. The tune without the words suggests something indefinite. We don't know precisely even what we are hoping for. We simply hear the tune within us that lifts our spirits whatever our circumstances might be.

Emily Dickinson re-created the way many people think about hope. It is not something we can manufacture. "Be positive," we tell each other in vain. Instead hope is just something that flies in and stays there, always singing, always inspiring us to keep going.