“‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers-” by Emily Dickinson, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost and “Perhaps "The World Ends Here" by Joy Harjo, are all poems that use symbols to represent their meaning. Each poem also uses literary devices to add spice and interest to the poem. Symbols and literary devices are both used to represent the themes present in each poem. Each author's biographical information strongly influences the style in which they write and the themes of their poems. Many poets use symbols to create illusions and to give the reader an object to make the concept easier to understand. “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” by Emily Dickinson compares hope to a bird. Reading the first stanza of the poem, the reader will realize that hope is a thing with feathers, but it does not specifically state what that thing actually is (Dickinson 710). According to Leiter, "a 'thing with feathers' is not yet a bird, but a kind of object, difficult to imagine and defined only by the fact that it is feathered, that is, winged, able to fly” (Leiter). As the poem progresses into the second stanza, it becomes more and more obvious that the “feathered thing” is actually a small bird (Dickinson 710). According to Randall Huff, “The poem seeks to defamiliarize the bird by placing it in the role of an indomitable hero, granting it the scope and means of communication (in this case, an image of endurance)… » (Huff). In the same way that Dickinson uses a bird to represent hope, Robert Frost uses two roads to symbolize choices. Frost begins his poem with the line “Two diverging roads in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both” (Frost 811). Frost makes it clear that the two decisions that lie before... middle of paper ...... locations "including positions at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the American Indian Studies Program at the University of California in Los Angeles” (McClinton-Temple). Although Harjo did not begin writing poetry until he was 22, Bochynski believes that “painting helped Harjo overcome the trauma of his early childhood and adolescence; poetry took her even further, and the woman who was afraid to speak as a child found her voice as a poet (Bochynski). All three poems have such great use of symbolism, from a bird to a road to a kitchen table. . These are all used to represent important themes in each reader's life. Life is full of difficult choices that everyone will eventually have to make, it is full of trials that require a lot of optimism and hope to overcome. Life is a precious gift that each of these poets understands on such a deep level.