Emily Dickinson

And this of all my hopes—

Repetition structure

The entire eight-line poem repeats verbatim. She's stuck in a loop, unable to move past this loss.

AND this of all my hopes—
This is the silent end.
Bountiful colored my morning rose,

Bountiful colored

Past tense—the rose was colorful. She's describing something already dead, though the poem pretends to build toward that revelation.

sere

Withered, dried up. An archaic word even in 1860s—Dickinson choosing stiff, biblical language for death.

Early and sere its end.
Never bud from a stem
Stepped with so gay a foot,
Never a worm so confident

Never a worm

The worm is inside the root—invisible destruction. She's watching something die from causes she can't see or stop.

Bored at so brave a root.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Worm in the Root

This poem works by misdirection. The first stanza seems to be building toward telling us what died—"this of all my hopes"—but instead gives us a metaphor: a rose. The second stanza should explain the metaphor, but instead zooms in on the worm, the hidden cause of death. We never learn what the actual hope was. Dickinson keeps the subject abstract, replaceable. It could be any hope.

The worm boring at the root is the poem's core image. Not a visible blight on the petals, but invisible destruction underground. The worm is confident—it knows what it's doing. The rose is brave—fighting back, maybe, or just unaware. This is how hopes die in Dickinson's world: not from obvious disasters but from something eating away underneath, something you notice too late.

"Early and sere"—it died young and dried up. The word "sere" appears in Shakespeare and the King James Bible ("sere and yellow leaf" from Macbeth), giving this personal loss a literary, almost biblical weight. Dickinson often used archaic diction to make private grief sound universal.

Why It Repeats

The poem is eight lines, then the exact same eight lines again. This isn't a refrain or a chorus—it's compulsive repetition, like re-reading a letter that contains bad news, hoping it will say something different the second time.

Dickinson wrote this around 1862, during her most prolific period—she wrote nearly 300 poems that year, many about loss, despair, and psychological crisis. Scholars debate what triggered this outpouring: possibly a romantic rejection, possibly a spiritual crisis, possibly just the Civil War grinding on outside her window in Amherst. The repetition here feels like someone stuck, unable to move forward, circling the same dead hope.

The form is close to hymn meter (common meter, actually—alternating 8 and 6 syllable lines), which Dickinson used constantly. She grew up singing these rhythms in church. Here the hymn structure makes the poem sound like a funeral service for a hope—formal, ritualized, final.