(sorry if I'm being silly, I'm a noob in all things arts and literature)

I was reading some stuff and realized that, when hope is the matter, the symbols are usually variations of these: nature awakening (flowers blooming, birds singing...), sunrise, sun coming from behind clouds, illuminated subject in a dark ambient.

As a mental exercise, I tried to remember/think of other images that are used or could be used to convey hope, but I can't think of any.

Have you ever written or read anything that uses other symbols to convey similar feelings as the images mentioned?

  • triangle [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Keeping a fire alive is common, proverbial or literal.

    Or when wives go out to a Widows Peak every day in anticipation of a husband that had to sail away. Although, maybe that's more a faith thing.

    In the Dark Tower series

    spoiler

    Roland's situation is revealed to be cyclical, and yet we feel hope when he repeats again but with the horn of elder.

    • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Keeping a fire alive

      My favorite use of this motif is in No Country for Old Men (the movie, I haven't actually read the book). Sheriff Bell, trying to reconcile faith in the Christian God with the seeming random cruelty of his world, speaks of dreaming that his long-dead father is sitting just up a path in the dark, waiting for him, a fire lit to guide the way. And then he wakes up, which I take to mean he comes to believe that his dream was just a dream, his father is not lighting the way to God, God is not there and never was— which dovetails nicely with a lesson Bell learns from his uncle earlier in the film about the world having always been just as cruel as it is in Bell's time.