Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“She would sing while I was weeping; If I listened, she would cease.”
- Source
- Hope — Emily Brontë
- Date
- 1846
Meaning of “She would sing while I was weeping; If…”
The unstable personified Hope seems available only at a distance, intensifying the poem’s portrait of encouragement that disappears when directly sought.
Where does it come from?
‘Hope,’ third stanza, in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, Project Gutenberg #1019. ‘She would sing while I was weeping; / If I listened, she would cease’ belongs to Brontë's deliberately bleak personification in which Hope behaves as a false, unreliable guard and finally departs. It is not simple positive-thinking advice or a clinical claim about hope.
