Lyrics
Read a book on Hemingway
Closed my eyes to see
The man himself appear to say
To write is just to bleed
So I will write it down, all the jagged edges
The ugliness I’ve seen
Until I change the truth rearrange the letters
For beauty underneath
Dear Hope
If you can hear me, don’t go
I don’t feel you now but I know you’re there
Dear Hope
I could really use you now
Throw me a rope
Throw me a rope
Dear Hope
I can’t seem to shake it yet, feeling that
Things may never change
It always breaks my heart when broken parts
Ache to heal again
So I will write it down and make jagged edges
Into something I can hold
Don’t want to lose my way
Like dear Hemingway
So I won’t let go
Dear Hope
If you can hear me, don’t go
I don’t feel you now but I know you’re there
Dear Hope
I could really use you now
Throw me a rope
Throw me a rope
Throw me a rope
Dear Hope
“Dear Hope” is one of my favorite songs (by one of my favorite artists, Sara Bareilles) as it speaks to a universal feeling: a desire to overcome hardships, for things to be better. She frames it as a plea to ‘hope’, and, as Christians, it is easy to correlate Jesus with hope.
In the first stanza, she refers to the quote often attributed to Hemingway: “Writing is easy. You just sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” An expression on how writing exposes one’s vulnerabilities. But it doesn’t take being a writer to relate to having vulnerabilities. Perhaps people that do not write are more prone to hiding theirs, but everyone has them, and experiences their jagged edges.
That is where Sara takes this quote and says, yes, being vulnerable can feel painful, but there is beauty underneath. No matter what may have caused those jagged edges – memories, experiences, personal struggles – it’s possible to sand those edges down into something you can hold.
Here is where she makes her first plea to ‘hope’. It’s hard to move past these jagged edges, the things that hurt us so. Of course we would call for help in those moments, but it’s hard to hold onto something while pain is digging into us.
In these times, we can feel alone when reaching out for help from Jesus, our hope. And we may not feel the help in that moment. It may feel like we’re just asking for the smallest sign that things will be okay. Asking for a rope to cling to. And that rope is there. The help is there, if we have the eyes to see it, the ears to hear it.
It may not always feel like things will change, but we shouldn’t give in to that. Broken parts want to heal again. They may not fit together like they once were but they can be fixed. Like with the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken pieces of pottery are put back together with gold, making the lines where the broken parts came together into something beautiful.
As Sara says in the last stanza, before the repeat of the chorus, she doesn’t want to lose her way like Hemingway did, becoming jaded by the pain he bled into his works. She wants to hold onto hope that things can be better, and will be, with time. We can do the same as we look to Jesus to guide us through our own hardship, holding onto His perfect hope to make it through.