drawing hope

Sometimes the New Yorker's famous covers say all that needs to be said. This week's by one of the magazine's regular stable of artists, Barry Blitt, is entitled "Hope is the Thing with Feathers."

That's also the famous first line of Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope," a metaphorical riff on the standard image of the Holy Ghost (or spirit) as a white dove. Dickinson, a gentle, eccentric, and reclusive spirit who died in 1886, no doubt would have been shocked and dismayed by just how much our contemporary, dictator-ridden world hungers for hope.

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

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Click on the image for a larger view

Mike L. Angelo
--30--