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.<\/p>\n
First, this lovely poem from Dickenson called “Hope is the thing with feathers”:<\/p>\n
\nHOPE is the thing with feathers
\nThat perches in the soul,
\nAnd sings the tune without the words,
\nAnd never stops at all,<\/p>\nAnd sweetest in the gale is heard;
\nAnd sore must be the storm
\nThat could abash the little bird
\nThat kept so many warm.<\/p>\nI \u2019ve heard it in the chillest land,
\nAnd on the strangest sea;
\nYet, never, in extremity,
\nIt asked a crumb of me.<\/i>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n
That was beautiful, wasn’t it?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And now the response, courtesy of Mr. Allen:<\/p>\n
\nEmily 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.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading “Birds of a feather”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}