I often have bits of poetry or phrases rattling around in my head. One that I've often repeated this year is "action is the antidote to anxiety" which is something I heard TV writer Liz Craft say on the Happier in Hollywood podcast. (The idea might date at least to Seneca in first century Rome.) I also tend to repeat "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers" (from William Wordsworth's poem "The World Is too Much With Us") during the holiday shopping season. "Hope is the thing with feathers" from the Emily Dickinson poem is another line that has resonated with me through the years, although I didn't know how much so until I started looking through my old work.
Past Years of Hope and Feathers
The earliest piece I could find was from 2012. I used to make these little embossed brass books for necklaces and Christmas ornaments. These were one of the first things I sold in my Etsy shop. This particular one was a transitional piece for me as I started to add hand stamping and hammering to the embossed book covers.
In 2014, I combined a charm with hand stamping to make this small oval ornament:
In 2016 I made an ornament where I mixed leather and metal together. I stamped the quote on aluminum and used copper accents for the ornament hook and feather. I added a dark patina to the wire and feather by hand. I loved how this piece turned out. I only made one of these and it sold that year.
In 2017-2019 I made a few of these handstamped aluminum keychains with this beautiful curled feather piece in the center.
A couple of times (2015 and 2017) I made necklaces featuring a the word hope (left) or a feather (right), but somehow didn't combine the ideas into a single piece. (Not surprisingly, these necklaces did not sell in this form.)
This year (2020) I made some feather dangle earrings with several types of feather charms and a wood-engraved tin to store them in. Given how famously reclusive the poet was it seemed appropriate to make a container where small treasures or secrets could be hidden by the new owner.
Postscript
I may periodically update this page with my latest designs.
Here's the first one for 2021:
I read quite a bit about this poem (and the poet) while writing this blog post. You could spend weeks just reading about all the speculation on her cause of death or love life alone. Here are some highlights from my research:
- Read the full poem at the Poetry Foundation. You might also like to see the manuscript version if you're curious about her handwriting.
- So many interpretations of this poem! I liked this shorter one from Owlcation.
- I enjoyed Alexa Dooseman's thoughts on how the poem ("the last poem I loved") affected her and the places she lived.
- I read about Emily Dickinson's white dress in an article in The Paris Review. Not much of her clothing survived, but many have written about this white dress and the color white in her work.
- The 2019 collection of her poems is titled Hope Is The Thing With Feathers and has a beautiful modern cover.
- Her house in Amherst, Massachusetts is now a museum. The museum has done some interesting projects, including a recent one that asked people to write postcards to Emily and a Spotify playlist with music that has ties to Emily Dickinson.