Building a Library of Hope

There's a shelf for Emily Dickinson ... and one for you

Feb 21, 2025

Dear Friends,

As I announced last week, I’m building a virtual library of hope, and you’re invited to help me stock the figurative shelves. In three days, this newsletter turns 2. To celebrate, between Monday and Thursday next week you’re invited to link your essay about any book, poem, song, play, speech, paragraph, or piece of graffiti — you get the idea — that once gave you hope. Publish the essay on your Substack and link it in the Comments section of “The Hope Library - What’s Your Story?” That post will go live on February 24th. Then come back to read other people’s essays.

Mar 2 UPDATE - About two dozen contributions to the Hope Library arrived last week, which are linked in the comments section of this post. I’ll be organizing the essays and the 5-word responses into a more readable format for my March 7 newsletter. All subscribers will receive it, as well as other bimonthly posts and announcements when future community writing events happen.

FAQ

My essay is ready now. Should I link it in the comments below? Not yet. Save it until I send out “The Hope Library - What’s Your Story?” on Monday, Feb 24. Add your link to the comment section of that post, so readers can find writers all in one place.

Length? No required length. I’m suggesting 500-1,200 words, but you know your story best.

Does it have to be just one book? It’s your story. If two books are closely connected, they could go in a single essay.

Does it have to be about the written word? Could I focus on a film or music without lyrics? Unlike a grant or competition where people get cut from consideration for this reason or that, any post that can make a connection, however imaginative and slight, between the prompt and the subject, is welcome. For example, this opening line would seem right at home to me in this gathering: "Tara asked for a book that inspired hope, and I looked out my window and saw one of last fall's maple leaves frozen to the edge of the gutter on the second story of the house. I need to drop everything and write about that leaf. At the moment, it has become my locus of hope." Maybe this post would have oblique references to books at the margins. My vision of this library has lots of good books in it, and relationships with books. But more important, it has us. Surprise me.

Can I share more than one post? Yes. You may link as many essays about hopeful books as you like when the Hope Library contribution window is open, Feb 24-27. If you do share more than one post, please also READ at least as many posts from others as you share, so everybody gets read at least once.

Can I link posts that I published earlier in my newsletter? Yes.

Do I need to write a Substack newsletter to participate? No and yes. You’ll need a Substack newsletter in order to publish an original essay. However, you do not need to be a Substack writer in order to READ and RESPOND to others. (There is a way to participate with just a 5-word response to someone else.) Watch for details when “The Hope Library - What’s Your Story?” goes live on Feb 24. Writers and respondents are all part of the library. You’ll see. :-)

Do I need to subscribe to this newsletter or pay anything to participate? No, and no. Subscribers to this newsletter will get reminders and guidelines in their inboxes at every stage of the project, but others can bookmark my homepage and come back to read and respond between Feb 27 and March 1. There are no paywalls on this project.

Can brand new Substack writers participate? Of course! From my first year, community gatherings have been about new writers and Small Stackers lifting each other up. Now there is a wonderful publication devoted to that called SmallStack by Robin Taylor (he/him) and friends, but we’re still chugging along at it here with community events roughly every quarter, too. There are many places to find your people on Substack.

Do I have to be positive and perky to participate? No. This is not a library of positivity, which can be studied and forced. We’re building a library of truth: big hopes and small ones and barely perceptible ones. For example …

This poem by Emily Dickinson is not hopeful … or is it?

Last week I wrote about a children’s book that belongs in my personal Hope Library. This week I’ll add a poem that has not dimmed a watt for me in all the years I’ve been reading it aloud to college students. Its 12 1/2 leaden lines may seem like a real joy-killer and a poor enticement for Gen Ed students to sign up as English Lit majors. But I trust poetry to land where it needs to land. And those 12 1/2 lines of heaviness are necessary for the last five syllables to have their effect. To read the words alone, I wouldn’t even call it hope. It’s more like proto-hope. But the miracle of sound in this Perfect Poem moves like water under ice. The music of this poem gets ahead of the words and gives me hope every time I read it.

Perhaps you know Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain” already — the poem in which a body is fragmented into ceremonious Nerves, a stiff Heart, and Feet that move mechanically; three stanzas devoted to the “formal” immobility that follows pain, the stone-like disregard, and the hour of life so stupefying that it may or may not be outlived. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross would have recognized in this poem the 4th stage of grief — depression — and the last one before “acceptance.”

You may also know a thing or two about poetic form and meter, so you’ve felt the multiple ways that one might interpret the poem’s buttery smooth, steady rhythm. We’ll come back to that. Here’s the poem:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
     
      Poem #372, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard 
      University Press, 1999)

For those who notice the words of a poem more than the sounds, here is why these 12 1/2 lines of depression and five last syllables of tiny, tiny change fill me to bursting with hope:

First, I notice that Dickinson begins the poem in classic iambic pentameter, the stately, dignified meter used by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and virtually every English-language poet up to Dickinson’s time. (Even Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins used the classic English meter sometimes.) There’s a little variation in line one, but after that, the meter strides along, steady and dependable:

the NERVES sit CER e MON i OUS like TOMBS —

the STIFF heart QUES tions ‘WAS it HE that BORE’

and ‘YES ter DAY or CEN tur IES be FORE’?

This stanza is unusual for Emily Dickinson. Most often, she writes tetrameter verse, or four stressed beats per line, but for the Stiff Heart’s question about whether Christ bore human suffering centuries ago or just yesterday, or at all, she eschews her usual musicality for this more ponderous, “formal,” and ruminative sound: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM.

but-THEN:

Her sufferer feels the stately rhythm of iambic verse as a “mechanical” pulse, not a living one. In stanza two, “the Feet” (the poetic name for each stroke of da-DUM) continue the pattern thoughtlessly while the lines crumble: 4 stressed syllables, then 2, then 3, then 2, then 4. The sufferer is still alive, but in a WOOD-en WAY, also stony, and broken, and small.

Given how steadily the da-DUMs march through this virtually catatonic stanza, you might feel that “the letting go” at the end of the poem is not much to hope for. After all, there is no break at all in the iambic flow of “da-DUM, da-DUM” (it might be numb) through the last stanza. Furthermore, you might read the sequence of the last line: Chill, Stupor, and Letting go, as the progression a “freezing person” makes toward death. The subject might seem numbed beyond reach. And maybe the best to hope for is a peaceful, uncomplaining, iambic death — the heart shattered from stiffness.

What makes this a hopeful poem for me is the rhymed pentameter couplet at the end. The shattered consciousness of stanza two begins stanza three with short lines (3 stressed syllables each), and then seems to strengthen. The lines grow in length from 3 stressed syllables to 5 again. And furthermore, the rhyme of the last two lines (“snow/go”) is more perfect than the near-rhyme at the beginning (“comes/Tombs”). The sound of the poem at the end is more assured than the sound at the beginning.

Here are those 3-beat lines, still broken up as in stanza two, at the beginning of stanza three:

THIS is the HOUR of LEAD –

Re-MEM-bered, IF out-LIVED,

There is still some doubt, in the three-beat lines, about whether the subject will even survive this pain. And then, literally without a lost beat, comes the white dove:

as FREEZ-ing PER-sons RE-col-LECT the SNOW —

first — CHILL — then STU-por THEN the LET-ting GO —

There are few things more beautiful and satisfying in English poetry than the return of a perfect iambic pentameter line after variations, except (even better) a perfect iambic pentameter couplet, rhymed to a fine point. So it is that sound that urges my sullen spirit to rise at the end of Dickinson’s poem.

But perhaps I’m bringing too much hope of my own to the poem. Perhaps this should be read as the dirge of a broken heart. I put it in my Hope Library, but you can decide for yourself whether it belongs in yours.

In the one-minute audio track below, I read the poem. Do you hear hope? —>>

Tell us what goes in your Hope Library next week. Watch for the doors to open Monday for your links. I can’t wait to read what gives you hope!