Today is Emily Dickinson’s birthday, as I suspect some of you already knew. What better occasion could there be to indulge in a little comparative literature – a sort of “call and response” between two great literary originals. So in honor of the Belle of Amherst on her birthday, I humbly present one of my favorites among her many poems. Followed, in the interest of literary diversity, by a response from New York’s own Woody Allen.
First, this lovely poem from Dickenson called “Hope is the thing with feathers”:
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.
That was beautiful, wasn’t it?
And now the response, courtesy of Mr. Allen:
Emily Dickinson said, “Hope is the thing with feathers. How wrong she was! The thing with feathers turns out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.”