The Speaker

The unnamed speaker, who might be Dickinson, only appears in the final stanza of the poem. The fact that she is absent from the first two stanzas of the poem implies that her message about the persistence of hope is universal, and does not simply apply to her individual circumstances. She materializes at the end to contextualize hope within her own life, and demonstrate how hope has tided her through the most difficult of situations, as symbolized by “the chillest land” (9) without asking “a crumb – of me” (12). The initial use of the passive voice in describing how the bird’s tune “is heard” (5) transforms, through the introduction of the first-person “I”, into an instance of active voice: “I’ve heard it in the chillest land” (9). Thus, the existence of the speaker emphasizes, at once, the universality of the poem’s relevance and its singularity in capturing her...