Hope usually gets flattering treatment in poetry. Dave Bonta's "Hope against hope" gives it a ribbon instead, and in six short lines turns a noble idea into something small, decorative and faintly humiliating.
The title is an idiom: to hope against hope is to keep hoping when there is no reason to. The poem splits the phrase in two and sets hope against itself. Each stanza offers a different version of it, a comforting one and a miraculous one, and undermines both.
The first stanza is built like a definition. "hope is a little doll / trimmed with ribbon" uses the flat verb "is," and after it nothing happens. There is no action in these three lines, and that is the point, because a doll does nothing on its own. Someone else has made it, dressed it and put it in our hands. "Little" and "trimmed with ribbon" make hope charming and also manufactured. Then comes the jolt: "a pretty slave." The word "pretty" belongs with the doll, but "slave" does not, and the poem leaves their clash unresolved. Hope could be a servant that cheerfully does what we need, always smiling and always available. Or we could be the ones enslaved, kept going by something decorative that we have no power to dismiss. The poem doesn't choose, and the uncomfortable pairing carries the stanza.
The second stanza moves from a toy to a conjuring trick, and its first word is an instruction: "buy a rabbit." That is deflating, because the magician's miracle begins with a purchase. If you bought the rabbit, you know exactly where it came from, so finding it in the hat would be no wonder. Then the syntax slips. "but like / the head of a king / never find him in a hat" is tangled on purpose. "Him" might be the rabbit or the king, and the comparison seems to say the rabbit will turn up in the hat about as often as a king's head would. A king's head already has its own hat, a crown, so the magician's hat seems a poor place to look. Some readers may hear something darker in "the head of a king," a head separated from its body. That is only an inference, since the poem never says it, but the ambiguity adds to the unease.
The sound of the poem supports this reading. There are no end rhymes, but the "h" of "hope" keeps returning in the second stanza, in "head," "him" and "hat," as if hope lingers in the words even while the sense denies it. The short "a" in "rabbit" and "hat" ties the trick's beginning to its empty end. The indefinite article also appears in nearly every image: "a little doll," "a pretty slave," "a rabbit," "a king," "a hat." Nothing here is particular or personal. Everything is a generic item, like stock in a shop or props in a magician's case, and hope is just one more thing to be bought.
The rhythm tells the same story. The first stanza runs six, four and four syllables, small and tidy like the doll it describes. The second runs six, five and seven, so the lines loosen and the last one stretches out, then ends on the blunt single syllable "hat." The lowercase lines and missing punctuation mean the poem never closes with a full stop. It simply stops, much as hope that never delivers just trails off. The break after "like" does something similar, leaving the comparison hanging as the expected arrival fails to happen.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so small a space. It doesn't argue that hope is foolish. It asks what sort of thing we are holding when we say the word, and whether hope that has been bought ready-made can ever produce a miracle. The poem is itself a small, neatly trimmed object, and it ends on an image of nothing in a hat.