When Despondency, Despair, and Disappointment assail the poet, he asks for Hope – which, like

these other moods, is personified here with a capital letter – to come and brighten his outlook.

Emily Brontë, ‘Hope’.

Hope was but a timid friend;

She sat without the grated den,
Watching how my fate would tend,
Even as selfish-hearted men.

She was cruel in her fear;

Through the bars one dreary day,
I looked out to see her there,
And she turned her face away!

Like a false guard, false watch keeping,

Still, in strife, she whispered peace;
She would sing while I was weeping;
If I listened, she would cease …

In this poem, the author of Wuthering Heights, like Keats above, personifies Hope, but here she
is a false friend, who only seems to be interested in being with the poet if her ‘fate’ is a good
one. Unlike Keats’s poem, then, Emily Brontë reflects the idea that hope is so hard to find when
we are at our lowest ebb, and this is precisely when we most need it.