"Hope" is a poem by British writer Emily Brontë about perseverance and adversity. Originally published in 1846, the poem personifies hope as the speaker describes its effect on her.
Brontë was born in the small village of Thornton, just outside of the town of Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In school, she showed early promise in her writing. With the encouragement of her sisters Charlotte and Anne, Brontë contributed her poems to a joint collection that all three of them released together. It was titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and this was where "Hope" was initially published. The collection received some favorable reviews but did not gain a wider readership until their novels gained mainstream recognition. While Brontë is primarily known for her Gothic novel Wuthering Heights, she was also a very prolific poet. Her work was often preoccupied with mortality and despair. This particular poem describes the changeable nature of hope in the life of a troubled speaker.
The poem begins by describing Hope as the speaker's reserved friend. She says that Hope seems to linger but never extends itself to her properly. The speaker adds that when she was suffering, Hope would sing, and when she paid any attention to it, it would stop. She depicts her further frustration with Hope as it vanishes at the moment when she is at her lowest. The speaker is expressing that Hope was never quite there when she needed it to be, always being flighty in her darkest hours.
The poem is written in five quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme. This is the format of the majority of Brontë's poems, although here the rhyme scheme particularly suits the song-like quality of the speaker's lament. The poem personifies Hope in an effort to make this feeling into something more literal and meaningful to the reader. This personification makes the speaker's sense of abandonment all the more real and painful.
