We started looking for jobs and “‘Hope’” became moving, a new home, forests, rain… Portland turned into the “tune without the words –,” that little bit of confidence that hummed within me, an intangible daydream. And so, every year, little by little, my husband and I made plans to move to Portland. I knew I couldn’t live in San Francisco forever. I’d ask him to meet me, just so I wouldn’t feel alone while surrounded by so many people.īut I had something “perch in the soul,” something that gave me energy and kept my mind moving.

On certain days, I’d have to call my husband from the car or Muni or BART because I’d feel so overwhelmed that I couldn’t summon the strength to walk home. Even though my career as a copywriter thrived and my apartment looked wonderfully, charmingly picturesque, I experienced a constant ebb and flow of unhappiness, an unshakeable feeling that I had gotten off at the wrong exit. There’s much to admire about the City by the Bay-but, for me, it instantly felt suffocating.

While Dickinson’s “‘Hope’” could resemble some shade of “God” or “Faith” in this poem (or, at least, that’s what I first thought), when I read the opening stanza, I immediately thought “Portland.” Most recently my breed of hope has been Portland, Oregon.įive years ago, I moved to San Francisco and, in a nutshell, it was a bad fit. Dickinson realizes that hope shifts and flutters and changes within you. “Hope.” Those cheeky quotation marks are everything. I had a smile on my lips, but the back of my eyes stung, a bizarre mix of joy and melancholy from how perfect words can be, how much they express with so little. The other day, I found “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –” and experienced that odd surge of emotion that poetry brings out. Anytime I open it up, a new poem needles itself into my brain and I’m left silently repeating the words long after I’ve closed the pages. And yet, The Poems of Emily Dickinson still calls to me from the shelf. During a course in graduate school, I read every single one of her 1,789 poems, making grand exclamations of tattoos I would get with her verses and gobbling up every dash and odd capitalization. At that moment, I realized, ah, this is poetry. They were also scratchings from a pencil, words making up the feet of Dickinson’s poetry.

I scanned Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” and understood that the “Boots of Lead” were more than pallbearers. A decade ago, in an undergraduate English class, I learned to love poetry.

Hope emily dickinson