"thing with feathers..."See in text(Text of the Poem)
Dickinson’s speaker depicts hope as a “thing with feathers,” which many of us will assume to be a bird. This “bird-as-hope” metaphor has been a part of the Western canon and Judeo-Christian tradition for millennia since the biblical story of Noah’s ark, in which a dove returns to the vessel with a message of hope: land had been found.
