Illustration by Dola Sun
Emily Dickinson and I have always had a thing. It’s no surprise that a shy girl would find a kindred spirit in the recluse poet from Amherst, Massachusetts. A woman the world neither understood nor appreciated while she was alive, who wrote constantly, scribbling down lines and joining words together in unexpected ways to help make sense of life.
It’s fair to say Emily had me at, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” circa eighth grade. There was the wit and inside joke of, “Are you – Nobody – too? / Then there’s a pair of us!” The reframing of nobody-ness as rebellious, “How dreary – to be – Somebody!” Being a happy nobody when everyone around you was desperate to be a yappy somebody? That’s golden material for a 13-year-old.
The poem was also darn catchy. I could hum it as I did my gymnastics beam routine, the meter of it sparking my poses and leaps just right. I think it was the first poem I memorized by choice.
Memorizing pieces of content came easy to me. Being raised Catholic, I had so many of those damn creeds to learn. But Emily was different. She was for me.
These days, it’s her poem about hope that I find myself repeating. Do you know it? “Hope is the thing with feathers,” it starts. It compares hope to a small bird that keeps singing despite gale-force winds.
I’m not giving away too much of a plot other characters also own by disclosing that last year was difficult for my family. It was a year of chaos as I tried to cobble together a support system for a teen battling something most people don’t understand. It’s fair to say that 2024 brought me to my knees, in all the ways: as a parent, a voter, a writer, a participant in this Byzantine healthcare system.
So many evenings, I’d be deadheading salvia or playing with the cat or straightening my Little Free Library, looking like a perfectly normal human being. But inside I was a twisted knot of a person. I’d stand in my pretty yard with my pretty flower beds, my Read Banned Books flag flapping, my tiny fairy garden twinkling. I’d smile at the neighbors walking their dogs or pushing their prams and think, I am barely making it. Can you tell? I had no feathers. Gills maybe, because I was trying to breathe underwater.
The year ended in a spectacularly bad way. I put away the holiday decorations the day after Christmas, mumbling to the tree as I yanked ornaments off, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, asshole.” It felt good to be resentful of every happy person on Facebook with their matching family pajamas and cozy celebrations. I swam angry laps at the Blue Ash YMCA and wrote in my journal and decided that things could only get better.
When I forced myself to make my vision board on the first day of 2025—it’s become a tradition for my teen daughter and I to go thrifting and then make vision boards together on New Year’s Day—I chose HOPE as the theme. I mean, MISERY would have been a little scary to see momma making, and JOY would have been an unsustainable lie.
HOPE was doable, though. I could almost hear Emily’s little bird singing. She was so small—a finch or a wren—and the mean, dumb world was knocking her about. But she stayed perched in the soul, singing the tune without words, never stopping.
If hope was a thing with feathers, I needed to find mine in the storm.
The first Emily Dickinson poem I remember reading was, “She sweeps with many-colored Brooms,” in my language arts textbook from fourth or fifth grade. I can still see the poem on the page, the picture of a cotton candy sky beside it, with its streaky red and purple clouds. The picture helped me understand the poem. Because kids don’t get poetry, despite what every well-meaning language arts teacher thinks. Even the precocious ones need a lot of clues.
Oh, a sunset!, I thought, feeling like I was in on the literary device. Like the poem was for me. The words were so pretty. Amber thread. Duds of emerald. And the verb sweeping. What child doesn’t want to sweep across the sky and fly into the sunset?
I can’t remember most of the other poems we studied in school, other than many were dreary, about war and death (Thomas Hardy) or full of overwrought sentiments that had little to do with my life (every Romantic poet ever). Walt Whitman, with his crazy beard and beautiful narcissism, was obviously a highlight, especially after the movie Dead Poets Society came out. His refusal to use capital letters made e.e. cummings so weird. The Beat Poets were sexy, but annoying.
By high school, the poems I found myself liking best were the ones about something, like struggle and injustice (“Mother to Son,” by Langston Hughes) or depression and patriarchy (basically anything by Sylvia Plath). I’d copy down my favorites on colorful stationery. “Lady Lazarus” is probably still in a box somewhere, along with my old diaries.
In my mind, the best poetry revealed angst. Because I was all angst. Emily Dickinson suddenly didn’t seem so angsty. At 16 and 17, I found “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” to be almost childish. Sing-songy. I was a girl listening to Bob Dylan, after all. What were poems about sunsets held beside “Masters of War?”
During holiday break my freshman year at NKU, I headed to the mall on Christmas Eve. I can’t be certain if it was the Florence Mall or the Crestview Hills Mall, but it doesn’t matter. It was 1992 at a mall in Northern Kentucky, and I was a lonely girl living at home in Ft. Wright. The Bell Jar was either on my bookshelf or soon to be there, and I was writing a lot of poetry. Some of it OK, most of it mediocre.
I was browsing in one of those old mall bookstores, either B. Dalton or Waldenbooks. The song “Same Old Lang Syne” was playing. You can imagine this scene. The mall. The nostalgic Christmas song. Me, in my grunge attire.
Now, picture me holding Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, a thick hardback with a glossy cover that featured an illustration of a bouquet of pink and yellow roses. Was I specifically looking at poetry? Was it randomly in a sale bin? I don’t know the reason I picked up the book. I only remember flipping through its pages, browsing the various sections titled things like Love and Nature and Time and Eternity, and thinking something along the lines of, “Oh, it’s you again.”
Did Dan Fogelberg singing about a chance meeting of old lovers set the tone? Obviously. I can’t hear the song without remembering standing in that mall bookstore, the big questions of life weighing heavily on me, immersed right back in Emily’s world—with her wild dashes.
No one poem stood out to me that day. By that point, I’d already had a favorite poem established: Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things.” (It’s yet to be usurped.) It was the body of Emily Dickinson’s work that jolted me. How she just kept writing. Poem after poem. That well of creativity. Refusing to stop.
I don’t remember anything else about the mall trip. Did I go to any other stores? Did I have an Orange Julius?
What I know is that I still have the book, and it’s been well-read and well-dog-eared over the last 30 years. The cover is yellowing. Cheap paper, I’m sure. I pull it out every so often and flip through it. It’s far easier to Google a poem, but sometimes I want to see poetry on the page, how I might have seen it at 19 or 23 or 30, before everything was one tap away.
Still, it’s fun to think about all the metaphors Emily could use for hope if she were alive today. If hope wasn’t the thing with feathers, what might it be?
Hope is text messages with your kid, when they’re telling you real things line by line. Hope is the click of a seatbelt when you pull into the frenzy of the world. Hope is the three solid blue lights on your WiFi router, which means you can Google the answer to every piece of darkness in your soul.
Our modern world offers up hope in ways Emily Dickinson never could have imagined. In the end, though, I’ll go with the feathers.
Facebook Comments