Hope

Dear Reader,

It is a well-documented phenomenon that people often turn to literature—especially poetry, scripture, and novels—during tough times. In a way, that makes sense, because books provide an opportunity for connection that doesn’t require much on the part of the reader. James Baldwin put it well: “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

Baldwin is 100% right, but I also think we turn to literature in times of stress to get a little bit of uplift, a little sense of what William Faulkner discussed in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: the idea that because of our inexhaustible voice, our soul, our spirit, we will “not merely endure: [we] will prevail.”

This week’s piece (another poem) I think embodies both Baldwin and Faulkner’s insights:

Background

Mueller (1924-2020) was an extraordinary woman. Born in Hamburg, she fled Nazi Germany with her family at age 15 and ended up in Evansville, Indiana. Mueller started writing after the death of her mother—in 1953—and she worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office while studying poetry on her own for over a decade. She published her first collection in 1965. Sixteen years later she won the National Book Award. Sixteen years after that she won the Pulitzer Prize.

“Hope” appears in two of Mueller’s books: The Private Life and Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. The poem consists of four stanzas (of eight, eight, five, and three lines), which are comprised in turn of four sentences that describe hope through personification and metaphor.

What It Offers

I love this poem for a couple reasons. First, the content is brilliant. Mueller links a child’s first breath to an earthworm’s regenerative body to a leaf flying on the wind. If you’re looking for opportunities for connection, like Baldwin, Mueller offers them beyond poetry—beyond even humanity and God—and in the most common subjects (a potato sprout).

Second, the structure works well given the subject matter. For some reason the poem’s formatting doesn’t entirely translate to this newsletter (it’s available here), but every two lines in the first two stanzas are staggered by a tab/indent, so they look almost like wings. I personally think this is a reference to Emily Dickinson’s famous description of hope as “the thing with feathers,” but, more importantly, the stanzas introduce a physical manifestation of the persistence of hope that builds and builds, literally pushing forward on the page with each line. The eight clauses reiterate, one after another, “hope is this,” “hope is this,” “hope is this,” with engaging, imaginative language that is full of vitality.

Then there’s a serious turn. The last two stanzas are very different. They get shorter and narrower. Some of the clauses become dependent. I like to think that this is where Mueller subjects her ebullient language to the test of adversity. But note that the persistent structure continues unabated. Hope is “the argument that refutes death.” Hope is “the genius that invents the future.” Hope is “in this poem, trying to speak.”

Hope, the structure emphasizes, may get quieter, break down, recede inside of itself, or lean on others for support, but it doesn’t quit. It is that inexhaustible voice of Faulkner; or, to revisit Dickinson, it proceeds on and “sings the tune without the words / And never stops—at all.”

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