“To Hope” by Charlotte Smith: A Critical Analysis  

Introduction: “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith

“To Hope” by Charlotte Smith first appeared as “Sonnet VI. To Hope” in her breakthrough sonnet collection Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays (first ed. 1784), later reissued and expanded in subsequent editions (including an enlarged 1786 printing). In the poem’s opening apostrophe—“Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!”—Smith frames Hope as a restorative, almost mythic presence she longs to “lure” back into her “haunts forlorn,” asking if it can “renew the wither’d rose” and “clear [her] painful path of pointed thorn.” Yet the central movement is disillusionment: Hope is an “Enchantress” imagined in “smiles and softness,” but “the flatterer flies,” leaving the speaker “a prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,” where “the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain” and “the vernal garland blooms no more.” The closing couplet still clings to Hope as “pale Misery’s love”—a cure that is “slow” yet “sure,” capturing Smith’s signature blend of bleak realism and fragile endurance. Its lasting popularity stems from this psychologically exact “melancholy sensibility,” its sharp nature emblematic (rose/thorn; fading flowers), and its historical role in the late-eighteenth-century sonnet revival that helped shape early Romantic lyric voice—especially a distinctly female, autobiographical register.

Text: “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith

Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!
    How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!
For me wilt thou renew the wither’d rose,
    And clear my painful path of pointed thorn?
Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest,
    Like the young hours that lead the tender year,
Enchantress! come, and charm my cares to rest:—
    Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear!
A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,
    Must I a sad existence still deplore?
Lo!—the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,
    “For me the vernal garland blooms no more.”
Come then, “pale Misery’s love!” be thou my cure,
And I will bless thee, who, tho’ slow, art sure.

This poem is in the public domain.

Annotations: “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith

#	Line	Annotation (meaning & effect)	Literary devices
1	Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!	The speaker addresses Hope as a comforting force that can ease suffering, elevating it into a near-divine presence.	🗣️ Apostrophe; 👤 Personification; 🎭 Exclamation; 🎵 Alliteration (“soother sweet”); 📜 Archaic diction (“thou”)
2	How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!	She asks how to attract Hope back into her bleak, lonely inner world—implying Hope has abandoned her.	❓ Rhetorical question; 🗣️ Apostrophe; ⚔️ Metaphor (“lure” Hope; “haunts” as inner life); 🎨 Imagery; 📜 Archaic diction (“thee”)
3	For me wilt thou renew the wither’d rose,	She wonders whether Hope can restore what has faded—like reviving a dead rose (lost joy/youth/love).	👤 Personification; 🌹 Symbol (rose); 🎨 Imagery; ❓ Rhetorical question (implied); 📜 Archaic diction (“wilt,” “wither’d”)
4	And clear my painful path of pointed thorn?	She frames life as a thorny path and asks if Hope can remove the sharp obstacles that wound her.	⚔️ Metaphor (life as “path”); 🌹 Symbol (thorns = suffering); 🎨 Imagery; ❓ Rhetorical question; 🎵 Alliteration (“painful path… pointed”)
5	Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest,	She calls Hope a gentle “nymph,” imagining it as beautifully clothed in softness—an idealized, soothing arrival.	🗣️ Apostrophe; 🧚 Mythic allusion (nymph); 🎭 Interjection (“Ah”); 🎨 Imagery; 🎵 Alliteration (“smiles… softness”)
6	Like the young hours that lead the tender year,	Hope is compared to early springtime hours that usher in a new season—freshness and renewal.	🪞 Simile (“Like…”); 👤 Personification (“hours… lead”); 🎨 Imagery; 🧩 Seasonal contrast (implied spring vs present bleakness)
7	Enchantress! come, and charm my cares to rest:—	Hope becomes a magician who can “charm” worries into peace; the speaker urgently commands its return.	🗣️ Apostrophe; ⚔️ Metaphor (Hope as enchantress); 🎭 Exclamation/imperative; 🎵 Alliteration (“charm… cares”)
8	Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear!	She laments that Hope behaves like a “flatterer”—promising comfort but escaping when needed most.	🎭 Interjection (“Alas!”); 👤 Personification; ⚔️ Metaphor (Hope as “flatterer”); 🎵 Alliteration (“flatterer flies”); 🧩 Contrast (invited vs absent)
9	A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,	She describes herself as hunted/consumed by distress—captured by a triad of suffering.	⚔️ Metaphor (“prey”); 🔢 Tricolon/list; 🎨 Emotional imagery (predation frame)
10	Must I a sad existence still deplore?	She questions whether she must continue mourning her life—exhaustion and resignation sharpen the tone.	❓ Rhetorical question; 🎨 Pathos; 📜 Poetic inversion/diction (“Must I a…”); 🧩 Persistence (“still”)
11	Lo!—the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,	A stark observation: beauty perishes quickly, while pain persists—setting up a bitter life-truth.	🎭 Interjection (“Lo!”); 🧩 Antithesis/contrast (flowers vs thorns); 🌹 Symbol; 🎨 Imagery; 🎵 Alliteration (“flowers fade”)
12	“For me the vernal garland blooms no more.”	She concludes that spring’s crown (renewal/joy) will not return for her—personal exclusion from rebirth.	🌹 Symbol (vernal garland); ⚔️ Metaphor (garland = happiness/renewal); 🎨 Imagery; 👤 Personification (“blooms” as fate); 🧩 Finality (“no more”)
13	Come then, “pale Misery’s love!” be thou my cure,	She paradoxically invites Hope even if it belongs to misery—asking it to act as medicine for suffering.	🗣️ Apostrophe; ⚔️ Metaphor (Hope as “cure”); 🧩 Paradox/oxymoronic phrasing (“Misery’s love”); 🎨 Visual epithet (“pale”); 📜 Archaic diction (“thou”)
14	And I will bless thee, who, tho’ slow, art sure.	She ends with a measured faith: even if Hope arrives late, it is dependable—closing with disciplined trust.	👤 Personification; 🧩 Antithesis (slow vs sure); 📜 Archaic contraction (“tho’,” “art”); 🎨 Tone shift (from lament to resolve)

Literary And Poetic Devices: “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith

Device (A–Z)	Example from the poem	Explanation (how it works here)
Alliteration	“painful path of pointed thorn”	Repeating initial consonants (p) intensifies the sting of suffering and makes the line sharper in sound as well as sense.
Anaphora	“Come… / …come… / Come then…”	Repetition at line openings stages insistence and desperation, as if the speaker is summoning Hope by sheer verbal force.
Apostrophe	“Oh, Hope!”	Direct address to an abstract idea turns Hope into a present listener, dramatizing the speaker’s emotional dependence on it.
Assonance	“thou soother sweet of human woes”	Repeated vowel sounds create a soothing musicality that matches Hope’s role as a “soother,” even while the speaker suffers.
Caesura	“charm my cares to rest:— Alas!”	Strong mid-line pauses (colon, dash, interjection) mimic a mind breaking off into sudden despair.
Consonance	“flowers fade, but all the thorns remain”	Echoed end/consonant sounds (notably s) add a lingering harshness, reinforcing what “remains” (thorns) after beauty fades.
Couplet	“be thou my cure, / … art sure.”	The final rhyming pair seals the plea with a compact resolution: Hope may be slow, but it promises eventual relief.
Diction	“thou, wilt, vernal garland”	Elevated, archaic word-choice gives the poem a formal, devotional tone, fitting the near-religious appeal to Hope.
Enjambment	“A prey to fear… / Must I a sad existence…”	The thought spills into the next line, conveying relentless anxiety that cannot be neatly contained.
Epithet	“sweet nymph”; “pale Misery’s love”	Loaded descriptive tags compress judgment and mood: Hope is idealized (“sweet”) yet also redefined as a faint companion of suffering (“pale”).
Exclamation	“Oh, Hope!” “Enchantress!” “Alas!”	Exclamations externalize emotional spikes—pleading, admiration, and collapse—so the poem sounds like a lived cry, not cool reflection.
Imagery	“wither’d rose… pointed thorn… flowers fade”	Vivid natural pictures convert inner pain into visible objects, making despair tangible (thorns) and loss memorable (fading flowers).
Metaphor	“my painful path of pointed thorn”	Life becomes a thorny journey: suffering is not a momentary feeling but the terrain the speaker must walk.
Paradox	“pale Misery’s love!”	Hope is named as something that belongs to misery—contradictory but psychologically true: the more one suffers, the more one clings to hope.
Personification	“Hope… the flatterer flies”	Hope behaves like a fickle person who “flies” away; this captures the instability of comfort during prolonged distress.
Rhetorical Question	“How shall I lure thee…?” “Must I… still deplore?”	Questions voice helplessness rather than seek answers, emphasizing that the speaker’s control over grief is limited.
Simile	“Like the young hours that lead the tender year”	Hope is compared to early springtime hours—fresh, gentle, promising renewal—highlighting what the speaker longs to recover.
Symbolism	“rose / thorns / vernal garland”	Rose/garland symbolize joy and renewal; thorns symbolize persistent pain—so the speaker’s world is defined by what has vanished versus what stays.
Tone	Plea → disillusion → fragile trust	The voice moves from yearning (“Ah come”) to bitterness (“the flatterer flies”) to a restrained final faith (“slow… sure”).
Volta (turn)	Around “A prey to fear…” (line 9)	The poem pivots from invocation and expectation to stark confession of ongoing misery—typical of a sonnet’s emotional “turn.”

Themes: “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith

• 🌿 Hope as a Personified Consoler and Desired Presence
  In “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith, Hope is not treated as an abstract feeling but as a being who can be summoned, persuaded, and begged for, which allows the speaker to dramatize her inner struggle as a relationship marked by longing and abandonment. By addressing Hope directly—“Oh, Hope!”—the poem turns private pain into a dialogue, and that dialogue intensifies the sense that consolation is both necessary and uncertain, since Hope behaves like a visitor who may refuse to come. The speaker’s “haunts forlorn” suggest a psychological landscape shaped by grief and isolation, yet she still imagines Hope as capable of softening “human woes,” as though tenderness itself were a remedy. This theme, therefore, hinges on the tension between spiritual need and emotional unavailability: Hope is figured as comforting, almost healing, but also elusive, and the speaker’s pleading exposes how fragile consolation becomes when it depends on a force that cannot be commanded.
• 🌹Loss, Withering, and the Vanishing of Renewal
  In “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith, the imagery of fading flowers and the “wither’d rose” frames the speaker’s life as a season in decline, where the natural cycle that promises renewal seems to have been interrupted for her alone. The rose functions as more than decoration: it symbolizes beauty, vitality, and perhaps affection that once existed but now lies beyond recovery, while the “vernal garland” evokes spring’s celebratory return—yet the speaker insists it “blooms no more” for her, turning a universal emblem of rebirth into a personal exclusion. What makes this theme powerful is the poem’s insistence that time does not automatically heal; rather, the speaker experiences duration as continuing deprivation, where what was delicate and lovely disappears first, leaving the harsher remnants behind. The contrast between flowers that fade and thorns that remain suggests a bleak economy of loss, in which pleasure is temporary but pain is durable, and this asymmetry becomes the emotional logic driving the speaker’s desperate appeal to Hope.
• 🌵 Suffering as a Thorny Path and the Predatory Weight of Distress
  In “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith, suffering is constructed as both environment and adversary: the speaker walks a “painful path of pointed thorn,” and she becomes “a prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,” which converts emotional states into forces that wound, pursue, and consume. This language makes distress concrete, almost tactile, so that anguish is not merely felt but endured like bodily injury, and the metaphor of thorns suggests repeated, unavoidable punctures rather than a single catastrophic blow. The poem’s pressure comes from endurance—“Must I… still deplore?”—because the speaker is not describing a brief crisis but a condition that persists, and persistence itself becomes oppressive when it offers no sign of relief. Moreover, by presenting fear and anxiety as hunters and herself as prey, the poem implies helplessness and exposure, as though the speaker cannot protect her inner life from assault. In this theme, Hope is imagined as the only agent capable of clearing the path, yet the path remains uncleared, which heightens the sense of existential exhaustion: life continues, but it continues as injury.
• ✨ Ambivalent Faith—Hope as Flatterer, Yet “Slow” and “Sure”
  In “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith, the speaker’s attitude toward Hope is deeply ambivalent, because Hope is simultaneously the desired healer and the suspect deceiver, the “Enchantress” who might “charm” cares to rest and the “flatterer” who “flies, and will not hear.” This duality captures a psychological realism: when one suffers for long periods, hope can feel like self-deception—beautiful, persuasive, and temporarily soothing—yet also like a betrayal when it fails to arrive at the decisive moment. The poem does not resolve this conflict by naive optimism; instead, it ends with a disciplined, conditional trust, as the speaker promises blessing to Hope “who, tho’ slow, art sure,” a line that concedes delay while insisting on eventual reliability. That closing movement matters because it reframes hope not as instant rescue but as gradual medicine—“be thou my cure”—and thus the poem’s final posture is not triumph but endurance shaped into principle. Hope, then, becomes a moral and emotional practice: the speaker doubts it, names its evasions, yet still chooses to affirm its possibility, because without that affirmation, the suffering would be absolute.

Literary Theories and “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith

🧠📚 Theory	Key lens (what it looks for)	References from “To Hope”	How the theory reads the poem (applied interpretation)
💔🌿 Romanticism / Proto-Romantic Lyric Theory	Emotion as truth; nature as a mirror of inner life; the solitary “I” as a site of authentic feeling.	“Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!”; “renew the wither’d rose”; “clear my painful path of pointed thorn”; “the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain”; “vernal garland blooms no more.”	Nature-images are not decorative; they externalize psychic weather. The rose/flowers/garland signify renewal and belonging, while thorns signify the endurance of pain. The speaker’s sincerity and immediacy (apostrophe + exclamation) enact the Romantic belief that lyric utterance can disclose an inner reality more reliable than social optimism (“the flatterer flies”).
🕰️🧩 Psychoanalytic Criticism (Freud / Lacan, broadly)	Desire, lack, anxiety; fantasy-figures that promise relief; the psyche’s oscillation between wish and disappointment.	“How shall I lure thee”; “Enchantress! come”; “Alas! the flatterer flies”; “A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain”; “Come then, ‘pale Misery’s love!’”	Hope functions like a fantasy object: the speaker tries to “lure” it back, but it repeatedly withdraws (“flies”), reproducing the cycle of anticipation → loss → renewed craving. Calling Hope both “soother” and “flatterer” exposes ambivalence: comfort is desired yet suspected as illusion. The paradox “pale Misery’s love” suggests Hope is bound to suffering—a coping formation that keeps the self going despite disappointment.
👩‍🎓⚖️ Feminist Literary Criticism (Gendered voice & authorship)	How gender shapes voice, authority, emotion, and social limits; the politics of sensibility and suffering.	“my haunts forlorn”; “A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain”; “Must I a sad existence still deplore?”; “For me the vernal garland blooms no more.”	The poem’s “I” performs legitimate female subjectivity within an eighteenth-century idiom of sensibility: intense feeling becomes a mode of truth-telling. Yet the repeated failure of Hope (“will not hear”) reads as a critique of consolations offered to the marginalized—promises of relief that do not address lived constraint. The speaker’s refusal to pretend (“the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain”) asserts moral and experiential authority against polite optimism.
🏛️🗂️ New Historicism (Late-18th-century culture of sensibility & sonnet revival)	Text as a cultural act embedded in institutions, genres, and historical pressures; how private feeling intersects public discourse.	Archaic/elevated register: “thou,” “wilt,” “vernal garland”; genre signals: sonnet-like turn at “A prey to fear…”; public rhetoric of consolation: “Hope… soother sweet.”	The poem participates in a period when the sonnet becomes a vehicle for personal distress and moral witnessing. Its language echoes cultural scripts of consolation and refinement (“nymph,” “Enchantress”), but the speaker breaks the script by insisting on residues of suffering (“thorns remain”). The “volta” dramatizes the era’s tension between sentimental ideals and harsh material/psychic realities, turning a conventional praise of Hope into a historically situated critique of empty reassurance.

Critical Questions about “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith

• ❓🌈 Does the poem present Hope as a genuine remedy or as a seductive illusion that deepens suffering?
  In “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith, Hope is framed with deliberate doubleness, because the speaker praises it as the “soother sweet of human woes” and invites it as a “cure,” yet, in the same breath, condemns it as a “flatterer” that “flies, and will not hear,” which makes Hope resemble a charming lie rather than a dependable aid. This tension matters critically: if Hope is an illusion, then the speaker’s longing becomes another mechanism of pain, since desire repeatedly reaches toward what continually withdraws. Yet the poem also suggests that even unreliable Hope can function therapeutically, not because it always arrives, but because the act of calling it—of imagining tenderness, spring, renewal—creates a psychological counterweight to fear and anxiety. Smith’s closing line, where Hope is “slow” but “sure,” implies a disciplined faith grounded in endurance, suggesting that Hope’s value may lie in its delayed persistence rather than immediate comfort, even when the speaker is unsure whether she is blessing a healer or pleading with a deceiver.
• ❓🌈 How does nature imagery (rose, thorns, vernal garland) reshape the poem’s argument about time, loss, and renewal?
  In “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith, the natural images are not decorative; they operate as a theory of lived time, where beauty and relief are fragile while pain proves durable, and this imbalance becomes the poem’s emotional logic. The “wither’d rose” compresses a history of decline into one emblem, while the “pointed thorn” turns suffering into a persistent physical reality, so that life is imagined as movement through injury rather than progress toward healing. When the speaker declares that “the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,” she rejects the comforting assumption that time naturally repairs what it harms, because the cycle of seasons—normally a promise of return—seems broken by personal grief. The “vernal garland” that “blooms no more” for her indicates exclusion from spring’s renewal, and therefore the appeal to Hope becomes urgent: if nature’s rhythm will not restore her, only Hope—personified and summoned—might interrupt the bleak continuity of loss, even if that interruption is uncertain and delayed.
• ❓🌈 What does the poem imply about the speaker’s agency—can she “lure” Hope, or is she fundamentally powerless before fear and anxiety?
  In “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith, the speaker oscillates between attempted agency and confessed helplessness, and that oscillation is central to the poem’s psychological intensity. On one hand, she speaks in imperatives—“come”—and even imagines strategies—“How shall I lure thee”—which implies that language, persuasion, and desire might summon Hope back into her “haunts forlorn.” On the other hand, she repeatedly encounters refusal: Hope “will not hear,” and the speaker becomes “a prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,” which casts her not as an actor but as a victim caught in predatory forces. The critical implication is that agency here is limited and inward: she cannot command external relief, yet she can still choose the posture of address, the persistence of calling, and the interpretive frame through which she names her condition. The closing vow—she will “bless” Hope, though “slow”—signals a final form of agency, since it converts desperation into commitment, even while admitting that rescue is not within her control.
• ❓🌈 Why does the poem end with qualified trust (“tho’ slow, art sure”) instead of resolution, and what ethical stance does that create?
  In “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith, the ending refuses neat consolation because the poem’s truth is not recovery but endurance, and endurance demands a hope that is believable precisely because it is not instantaneous. By calling Hope a “flatterer,” the speaker exposes the moral risk of optimism that merely sweetens pain without changing it, and yet she still asks Hope to be her “cure,” which suggests that the alternative—total despair—would be more destructive than the possibility of self-deception. The final clause, “tho’ slow, art sure,” creates a carefully rationed faith: Hope is not glorified as a miraculous rescuer but respected as a delayed certainty, and this delay keeps the poem honest about suffering that persists beyond a moment. Ethically, the stance becomes one of stoic persistence rather than romantic uplift, because the speaker chooses to keep open a future horizon even while her present remains thorned. The ending therefore models a discipline of belief—hard-won, skeptical, yet sustaining—where trust is not a feeling but a decision repeatedly renewed.

Literary Works Similar to “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith

1. 🌺 “Sonnet to Sleep” by Charlotte Smith: This poem mirrors “To Hope” by personifying Sleep as a sought-after entity that the speaker desperately courts for relief from sorrow, only to be denied the comfort it brings to others.
2. 🥀 “Ode on Melancholy” by John Keats: Similar to Smith’s exploration of the “wither’d rose” and “pointed thorn,” Keats examines how joy and pain are inextricably linked, suggesting that true sensitivity to beauty requires an understanding of its fleeting nature.
3. 🕊️ “Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson: While Smith’s poem laments Hope’s flight and betrayal, Dickinson’s poem provides a direct thematic counterpoint, portraying Hope as a resilient bird that “perches in the soul” and never stops singing, even in the harshest storms.
4. 🌑 “Dejection: An Ode” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Like Smith’s speaker who feels disconnected from the “vernal garland” of spring, Coleridge’s speaker expresses a deep sense of numbness and an inability to feel the joy of nature, highlighting the internal landscape of depression.

Representative Quotations of “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith

🌈 Quotation	Context in the poem	Theoretical perspective
🌟 “Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!”	Opening invocation: the speaker names Hope as a consoling power before describing her own desolation.	Apostrophe / Lyric Theory (Proto-Romantic): The direct address turns an abstraction into a present being, establishing the lyric “I” as emotionally authoritative; Hope is framed as a necessary psychic medicine against “human woes.”
🕳️ “How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!”	The speaker confesses separation from Hope and imagines Hope as something that can be invited back.	Psychoanalytic Criticism: Hope functions like a desired object that has withdrawn; “lure” suggests anxious desire and a compulsion to restore what is missing, revealing dependence and lack.
🌹 “For me wilt thou renew the wither’d rose,”	The speaker asks if Hope can restore what has decayed—beauty, vitality, joy.	Symbolic / Romantic Nature-Imagery: The “wither’d rose” is a natural emblem of faded happiness; nature becomes the language through which inner loss is made visible and persuasive.
🌵 “And clear my painful path of pointed thorn?”	The speaker imagines life as a journey obstructed by suffering.	Conceptual Metaphor Theory: Existence is mapped as a “path”; pain is materialized as “pointed thorn,” making psychological distress concrete and bodily, not merely abstract sadness.
🌸 “Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest,”	Hope is idealized as a gentle, quasi-mythic figure associated with tenderness and comfort.	New Historicism (Culture of Sensibility): The “nymph” and “softness” echo late-18th-century sentimental aesthetics—consolation is staged in refined, classical personification before it is questioned.
⏳ “Like the young hours that lead the tender year,”	Hope is compared to early seasonal time—springlike promise and renewal.	Romanticism / Temporality: The simile binds Hope to cyclical time and seasonal rebirth; the speaker longs not just for relief, but for a return to the world’s “tender” beginnings.
🎭 “Enchantress! come, and charm my cares to rest:—”	The plea intensifies: Hope is imagined as possessing magical power to quiet mental anguish.	Psychoanalytic Criticism: “Charm” signals wish-fulfillment—an almost hypnotic fantasy of shutting down anxiety; the speaker seeks psychic regulation through an imagined external agent.
🕊️ “Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear!”	The poem’s disillusionment breaks through: Hope is fickle, evasive, and unreliable.	Deconstructive / Irony-oriented reading: Hope is split into comforter and “flatterer”; the line exposes the instability of consolation—what promises healing can also deceive, then vanish.
🥀 “Lo!—the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,”	Stark summary of the speaker’s condition: beauty disappears; pain persists.	Existential / Realist strain within lyric: The antithesis (flowers vs thorns) asserts an uncompromising truth about suffering’s duration, resisting sentimental optimism and insisting on residue.
🌫️ “Come then, ‘pale Misery’s love!’ be thou my cure,”	Final turn toward a paradoxical, diminished Hope—still sought as remedy, though joy is absent.	Feminist + Psychoanalytic (Ambivalence): Hope is redefined as misery’s companion, not bliss’s herald—an ethic of endurance rather than romance. The speaker claims the right to speak pain without prettifying it, yet refuses total surrender.

Suggested Readings: “To Hope” by Charlotte Smith