Hope, and other things with feathers

This week at Belding, students read Emily Dickinson's Hope is the thing with feathers, and discussed Dickinson's personification, vivification, of hope. We explored the concept of personification, discussed its potential within a poem, and its uses to a poet as a tool of communication. Students responded to Dickinson's example with their own poems that gave human or animal attributes to an emotion. Some student examples are below:

from Mr. Merrill's class:

Happy

by Arnel

Happy looks like a yellow chick
learning how to walk
happy is a little chick cheeping
light sounds
happy is like a chick jumping.


***

Joy is the thing with fish

by Karim

Joy is the thing with fish
that searches for planktons
and that swims with its
lovely tunes and never stops
at all. Its fins are soft
as fluffy hair.

***

An elephant's anger

by Caleb

Anger has a tail. Anger has tusks.
Anger is in a circus
act.
And anger's name is
an
Elephant!


***

from Mr. Aivaizan's class

***

by Warren B.

Crocodile is an angry big animal.
He bites people's legs. He has blood
under his teeth. He eats somebody's
stuff. And he stomps his feet on the floor.
He also swims in the lake. And that's how
a lot of things when a crocodile gets angry.

***

Hopes was a bird

by Christopher

Because they had a lot of feathers and they eat
lots of fruit and berries and they also
fly at any single tree to land on it. The birds
were very beautiful and they had colors
on its feathers and that was
a hope for the person.

***

by Charmaine

Hope is I want
to go back
and live
with my
mom.

Hope is
scared
of
my
Godness.
Hope.

Hope is joyful
to me.

***

from Ms. Navrocki's class

***

Gale, the Strong Wind

by Katie G.

Gale, the strong wind always
whistles in the cold, rough afternoon.
If you make gale angry he
will try to destruct everything.
Horrible he is, horrible he always
will be.
If he calms down he is
as sweet as a bird
and makes the sun
shine like a beautiful shining firefly.

***

Love is a thing with hope

by Michelle

When you love
you hope she
or he likes you
and love is when
you like someone
a lot, and when you
love a animal
of hope
gets in you forever
and if he or she likes
you the animal of hope
gets in her or him.

***

Bored

by Rianne P.

"Bored" is the thing that sleeps throughout the
day. Just hangs on the tree, and
sleeps, and sleeps. It's all quiet
and it is night. As the jungle
sleeps the sloth just swings back
and forth on the tree. When
the sloth wakes up it goes back
to sleep. As the "mighty" plays and
hunts for prey the rest of the
tigers just watch and stay.