Emily Dickinson Literary Devices

"Hope is a strange invention", written in 1877, demonstrates Emily's individuality and cleverness with the structure and the organization of her poetry. This literary piece consists of two quatrains and follows the pattern of an iambic trimeter and an iambic tetrameter every other line. The rhyme scheme mimics the imperfect sequence ABAC, which possesses Dickinson's typical style. The Transcendentalist often compares hope to unrelated things, like when she writes, "hope is a strange invention" or "this electric adjunct". These comparisons, termed metaphors, appear sporadically throughout the poem.