Emily Dickinson's eight-line riddle: what finally kills hope?
In just eight short lines, Emily Dickinson argues that hope has no real foundation and would collapse if it ever examined itself. Crushing setbacks only make it start again. The one thing that can destroy it, she suggests with a sting in the last word, is success.
The poem begins with a hypothetical. If Hope could look closely at what it stands on, its work would be over, because its licence to operate is either invented or missing altogether. Dickinson gives the abstraction a gender and a trade: Hope is a woman with a craft and a charter, like a guild member whose paperwork turns out to be forged.
The second stanza reverses expectations. Blocked in the greatest possible case, Hope simply begins again. It can be brought down by just one killer, and Dickinson saves that killer for a final line of a single word: "Prosperity --". The logic is quietly paradoxical. Failure feeds hope, since there is still something to wish for, while getting what you want leaves nothing left to hope about. The poem never says this outright; the reader has to assemble it from the compressed clauses.
The technique is typical of her. Lines are short and clipped, dashes cut the thought into pieces, capital letters turn common nouns such as Basis, Craft and Charter into near-characters, and a legal and commercial vocabulary is borrowed to describe an emotion. The Poetry Foundation has described her writing as an elliptical language for what is possible but not yet realised, which fits a poem about wanting.
Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in December 1830 into a prominent family; her grandfather helped found Amherst College and her father served in Congress. She studied for seven years at Amherst Academy and briefly at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Of nearly 1,800 poems she wrote, only 10 appeared in print while she lived. After her death in 1886 her sister Lavinia found the poems in her desk. Early editions from 1890 smoothed them into conventional shape, and only Thomas H. Johnson's complete edition of 1955 brought them back close to what she wrote.
Source: Could Hope inspect her Basis
