In this excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” I found a great connection between the poem and Oscar Wilde’s, “The Happy Prince.” While looking up the definition of hope, I found two separate meanings; the one that everyone knows of, “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen,” and one that brought Dickinson’s poem and Wilde’s story together for me, “a feeling of trust.” Thus, I would like to focus on “hope” as a feeling of trust.

In the beginning of Wilde’s story, when the Swallow was searching for shelter, he found the statue of the Happy Prince and decided to sit down at its feet. When he realized that the statue was crying, he went up to speak with it. After listening to the statue of the Prince sobbing about the ugliness of the city and how he would like to distribute his jewels and gold to those who need it throughout the city, the Swallow agreed to help him do that. From this we see that the Prince gained hope that these people that are enduring the ugliness of the city will become happy, and trust in the Swallow, and that he will successfully distribute these jewels and gold.

After each time that the Swallow states that he must leave to Egypt, the Prince hopes and trusts that he instead stays, and helps him with another task and act of good, which in the end he does. Even after the last jewel was plucked from the Prince’s eye and he was left with nothing of value on him anymore, the Swallow voluntarily agreed to stay with him, leaving the Prince with the sense of trust in the love and relationship that he and the Swallow had. All in all, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” “hope” is the bird, the Swallow.