Hope is a Lousy Friend

When I first read the poem Hope I was sitting at my dorm room desk flipping lazily

through an enormous collection of poems. I was reading the poems from a book over two inches

thick called, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, which contained over 1,800 poems and had paper

so thin I could see the faint writing of the next page through the one I was reading. I was looking

through this collection of poems because I needed to select one for my January Term class,

Poetry in Performance. I looked through the pages, uninterested in most of the poems I saw and

only pausing at a few that seemed to catch my eye before deciding they werent interesting

enough to write on and moving on. I continued this pattern of mindlessly flipping through pages

until I came across an author I recognized, Emily Bronte. I had known about Bronte from her

novel, Wuthering Heights which I had enjoyed immensely when I read it for an English Novel

class. Deciding that Bronte may have something more interesting to offer than the other authors I

had been looking at, I decided to browse the five poems of hers in the collection. The first,

Long Neglect has Worn Away, told the story of a woman looking at the grave of her deceased

boyfriend. I had gotten tired of reading poems about poets mourning their dead lovers so I

decided to see what the second one had to offer. The next poem was called, Hope and I was

much more taken by this poem than by any other one I had read:

Hope was but a timid friend;

She sat without the grated den,

Watching how my fate would tend,

Even as selfish-hearted men.

She was cruel in her fear;

Through the bars one dreary day,

I looked out to see her there,

And she turned her face away!

Like a false guard, false watch keeping,

Still, in strife, she whispered peace;

She would sing while I was weeping;

If I listened, she would cease.

False she was, and unrelenting;

When my last joys strewed the ground,

Even Sorrow saw, repenting,

Those sad relics scattered round;

Hope, whose whisper would have given

Balm to all my frenzied pain,

Stretched her wings, and soared to heaven,

Went, and neer returned again!

One of the main things that drew me to the poem was the subject. As I said, many of the poems I

had read in the anthology dealt with love and the authors despair at losing it. Seeing a poem

about hope and how Bronte was unable to reach it made me fascinated and caused me to wonder

what situation Bronte was in where she had needed hope but could not find it. While Brontes

source for writing the poem may have stemmed from some of the tragic events in her own life

including the death of her sister Maria, the poem itself reminded me of a fight I had had with my

friend in grade school (Tompkins). During recess in sixth grade me and my two other friends

Frankie and Timmy were playing soccer. Unfortunately, Timmy accidentally kicked the ball out

towards one of our schools windows and cracked it. Frankie and Timmy both immediately ran

away leaving me alone by the broken window so when the teacher came by to see what had

happened I was naturally blamed for it. Not wanting to get into trouble and seeing no way to get

out of the situation I told on my friend which caused a massive conflict between us afterwards.

The fight was so bad that we refused to speak to one another for almost an entire week. While

the fight was eventually resolved I remember feeling incredibly sad during this time because I

believed I had destroyed my friendship and that there would be no other chance to mend it. This

feeling of hopelessness was reflected through the poem so it stood out to me.

Still, I thought there may be other poems worth looking at before I decided on one to

write my paper on. While I had been interested in this poem I was not blown away by it in the

way my professor told our class we would be when we found the right one. Still, I decided to

mark down the page number of the poem and head to the library to work on other reading before

returning to see if I could find another poem that would spark my interest. It wouldnt be until

later that night that I would look at the poem again.

 The second time I opened up the Norton Anthology of Poetry to Brontes poem I was

sitting in the area outside of the library at nine at night. The desk where I was sitting had

numerous sheets of paper scattered around with various notes on different poems scribbled

across them. Since finishing my reading assignment nearly two hours earlier I had been looking

through the anthology trying to find a decent poem that I felt confident enough to write on.

Unlike the first time I had been looking through the anthology in my room, however, this time I

was angry and frustrated at not being able to accomplish what I thought would be a simple task. I

was angry that none of the poems I had looked at in those two hours had sparked my interest in

any way. This anger and frustration was only intensified by the fact that this was the first night of

January Term; if I couldnt find a poem that would work, then what hope was there of my being

able to go through the rest of the course? None of this frustration was helped by where I was

working.

I was sitting in the small hallway outside the library because the library had closed down

at seven oclock during January term meaning all of the students who had been staying at the

library had to move out and work in this small room. This meant that the two groups of students

working on group projects who had previously been in their own study rooms were now in the

same room trying to talk over one another. On top of this the two vending machines in the room

made a loud humming sound that would turn on for around thirty seconds before going off again.

While I could still work fairly easily in this situation having come from a large family at home, I

was annoyed that I was forced to sit here all because the school couldnt be bothered to keep the

library open to a reasonable hour. With this combination of frustration, depression, and

annoyance I decided to stop looking for any new poems and simply choose one from the list I

had written down, starting with Brontes Hope.

 In my frustration at being unable to find any poems that wowed me in the way my

teacher said one would, I had somehow forgotten what Brontes poem was even about. When I

re-read it for the second time, however, I developed a newfound appreciation for it. Reading of

how hope had ignored and abandoned the speaker in Brontes poem I realized I myself had felt

the same way in looking for a poem. While I had connected with the poem because of the

feelings I had over the fight with my friend Timmy, re-reading the poem again when I was

actually feeling this sense of hopelessness drew me towards it even more.

I was not simply attracted to this sense of hopelessness, however; I was also drawn to the

anger of the poem. Throughout Brontes work the speaker attacks hope for abandoning her, at

one point even calling her false and unrelenting (9-12). I was not only hopeless at being

unable to find a poem, I was angry. I was angry at myself for not being able to get my work

done, angry at the school for not being able to keep the goddamn library open, angry at the poets

for not writing something more interesting. What made me all the more frustrated at this was that

I felt that I had no control over these events which drew me even more towards Brontes poem.

The speaker has no control over hope abandoning them in their time of need and seem to have no

other option other than to express their anger towards it. While I saw that Bronte was angry at

hope for abandoning her the first few times I read it on my own, it was not until later when I read

it in class that I fully understood how angry Bronte was making the speaker. The first two times

that I read the poem in class, I had a more somber annoyed tone rather than the angry one that

the poem called for. This was partially due to my own insecurity about acting angry in front of

the class, but was also partially due to the fact that I did not yet fully know how angry the

speaker was. After finishing reading through the poem my second time in class, my teacher told

me that I needed to be overly annoyed and angry if I wanted to read the poem effectively. I
needed to show much more emotion that I had been showing and be overly dramatic in my

delivery. Reading the poem aloud in this newfound angry way only further helped show me why

I had been drawn to the poem. It reflected the anger I had been feeling as I sat miserably in the

library looking for a poem to choose from. Ironically, through reading this angry poem on the

loss of hope I was able to actually regain some sense of hopefulness and felt much better.

It is interesting that Hope stood out to me above other poems as the structure of the

poem is hardly unique. In terms of meter, every line in the poem is either seven or eight syllables

long with the only exception being the fifth line which is six syllables long (1-20). In terms of

feet, all of the lines that are seven syllables longin addition to the six syllable lineare

trimeters while the eight syllable long lines are all tetrameters (1-20). The poem is twenty lines

long, and the lines are broken up into quatrains (1-20). The first, third, and fifth stanzas each

follow a pattern of switching between trimeter and tetrameter lines while the second and fourth

stanzas do not follow the same pattern (1-20). While this structure may be fairly repetitive,

reflecting on the poem it may have been this repetitiveness which caused me to be drawn to it.

This repeating meter of the poem creates a simple rhythm for the reader to follow which lends

the poem a sense of comfort. In the same way that a child may be drawn to a mother

continuously rocking it back and forth, the poems words were able to rock me with its structure

to calm me down and relieve my anxiety. The way in which the poem stressed its syllables

contributed to this rocking feeling as well. Almost every line in Hope is trochaic with a few

exceptions and around half of the lines in the poem contain only trochaic feet (1-20). Because of

this, lines such as the ninth, Like a false guard false watch keeping can read especially
rhythmic and repetitive (9). While the meter was important in providing a familiar comforting

feeling in the poem it was not the only element to do so.

The rhyme scheme in, Hope is similar to the meter in that it is fairly simple and yet

comforting in a way. The poem has a familiar pattern of rhyming the ending of every other line

as seen in the first stanza where friend from the first line is rhymed with tend from the third

(1-3). For the most part the rhymes of the poem are fairly simple and I never came across a

rhyme in the poem which I thought was especially unique or unexpected. Still I think this only

added to the comforting nature of the poem. Brontes poem reminded me of the nursery rhymes I

would listen to as a child that used similarly simple rhyme schemes and therefore appealed much

more to me. After having spent so long looking over different poems whichif rhymes were

used at allemployed complex rhyming patterns, I was drawn to something more familiar that I

could easily understand. While both the rhyme scheme and the meter provide a comforting sense

to the poem, there is one more element of the poem which Bronte employs which helps me in

reading it.

Bronte uses the image of Hope as an actual person to provide a more familiar feel to the

poem. While the notion of hope is a fairly abstract one, Bronte chooses to transform hope from

an abstract feeling to a concrete friend who has shunned the speaker. While I still would have

connected with the message of the poem even if Bronte had not used the symbol of a lost friend,

the fact that Bronte did made me connect with the poem all the more since I understood both the

abstract idea of losing hope, and the concrete notion of a friend abandoning you. As I mentioned

earlier, the poem initially reminded me of losing my friend Timmy so this symbol was especially

alluring to me. Not only does this notion of a friend abandoning the reader bring the poem less

out of the abstract, it also provided me, again, with a sense of comfort. When I had gotten into
the argument with my friend and believed that we would never speak to one another again, we

eventually were able to reconcile our differences and come back together. In representing the

loss of hope as losing a friend I was able to find comfort in the poem knowing that friendships

can almost always be mended. While the speaker may believe they have lost all hope forever,

they may be able to find it again.

 Works Cited
Bronte, Emily. Hope. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, edited by Alexander Allison, Herbert
Barrows, Caesar Blake, Arthur Carr, Arthur Eastman, Hubert English, W.W. Norton &
Company, 2005, pp. 1046-47.

Tompkins, Joyce. Emily Bronte. Encyclopedia Britannica.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emily-Bronte