NEVER IN EXTREEMITY

  Recently my daughter in law sent me a poem, ‘Hope’ by John Roedel. We share stuff like that sometimes and she knows what I might like. I thought it like the Call part in a Call & Response from church tradition so I responded with Emily Dickinson’s poem, ’Hope’. Roedel characterized Hope as a treasured stone you carry in your pocket, just the feel between your fingers was uplifting. Then he turned it upside down, portrayed Hope as a river you can float in, it can carry you; a reassuring metaphor. In Roedel’s free verse he juggled with line length but otherwise it could have read like prose. 
Dickinson wrote with tight, measured phrasing that coupled like rhyme but not quite. I wrote recently about wordsmiths, writers who not only choose the perfect words but arrange them naturally as petals on the bloom. Emily Dickinson was maybe the ultimate wordsmith. Her poem ‘Hope Is A Thing With Feathers’ required only three verses, twelve short lines. Today, this little reflection opens with free verse and closes with Dickinson. 

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.