Dave Bonta's short poem treats hope with suspicion. In the first stanza, hope is a little doll dressed up with ribbon, and then, sharply, "a pretty slave." The image is charming on the surface, but the last phrase turns it uncomfortable. A doll is something we keep, arrange and make decorative, and calling it a slave suggests that hope is something we force into service, made to smile and look nice whether or not it has any real power.
The second stanza is more puzzling. It seems to play on the magician's trick of pulling a rabbit from a hat. You can buy the rabbit, but the "head of a king" never turns up in the hat. Reading loosely, the poem suggests that we can purchase small comforts, yet the great, authoritative thing we truly want never appears. The speaker sounds wry and a little weary, and the mood is cool, ironic and quietly disillusioned, as the title's "hope against hope" hints.