The real difficulty in making a selection of the Brontë poems is the simple one, that the most fragmentary and faulty of Emily’s poems, even if it is but a few inconsequent lines, is more interesting, to speak frankly, than the most polished and finished poem by either Charlotte or Anne. It was not that Emily’s experience was more poignant or tragic, it was not either that her human affections were deeper – indeed her attachment to animals and places was so strong that she seems to have formed scarcely any human alliances, except with her sister Anne. But her attitude to life was somehow larger and bolder, and the scanty glimpses we gain of her spirit give the sense of a consuming fire.
A. C. BENSON: ‘Introduction’ to Brontë Poems (1915)
Emily Jane was the daughter of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, a Church of England clergyman from Northern Ireland, and Maria Branwell from Cornwall. Her siblings were Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick and Anne. Maria and Elizabeth, the oldest, were born in Hartshead, near Dewsbury in Yorkshire; the others in Thornton, near Bradford. In 1820, the year before Maria Branwell’s death, the Reverend Patrick Brontë took up the living of Haworth, a bleak and desolate weaving village not far from Thornton. This environment and the parsonage now became the centre of the children’s lives. Emily spent a few brief periods away from Haworth – in 1837 as governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, followed by a sojourn in Brussels at the pensionnat run by Monsieur Constantin Heger, to improve her knowledge of German and French. She proved resistant to the teaching methods of M. Heger, who found her too independent-minded. While in Brussels, she gave piano lessons to some of the pupils, and practised her talents as a draughtswoman – Emily was, perhaps, the most artistic of the Brontë family. When her older sister Charlotte wrote to the English Poet Laureate Robert Southey, requesting him to advise her about writing, she received this withering reply: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called & when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.’
Three years before Emily’s death, Charlotte discovered her younger sister’s poems, and arranged for a joint publication: Poems, by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, which was published in 1846 and all but ignored by the critics. It was also Charlotte who urged the publication of the novels that she and her sisters had written. The Professor, Charlotte’s novel about her experiences in Brussels, was rejected, but published posthumously in 1857. Four novels, however, did appear while their authors were still alive: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847), written between October 1845 and June 1846, and Anne’s Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Emily, the most solitary of the sisters (unlike Charlotte she had no close friends), created with Anne the imaginary world of Gondal which inspired some of her most successful dramatic ballads, such as ‘Remembrance’. She died of tuberculosis in December 1848 and is now considered in some quarters as one of the most original poets of the century, although she did not publish during her lifetime a single poem under her own name. The decade of her literary activity (roughly 1836–46) occurred at a time when only John Clare and Tennyson, among other English poets, were at the height of their powers. Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge were dead, while Browning was only just appearing in print. Emily Brontë rarely gave titles to her verse – the sole exception here being ‘A day dream’; and she did not always punctuate her manuscript poems.
Love is like the wild rose briar,
Friendship, like the holly tree
The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms,
The wild rose briar is sweet in spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who will call the wild-briar fair
Then, scorn the silly rose-wreath now
And deck thee with the holly’s sheen
That when December blights thy brow
He still may leave thy garland green –
[On a sunny brae, alone I lay
One summer afternoon;
It was the marriage-time of May
With her young lover, June.]
[…]
A thousand thousand gleaming fires
Seemed kindling in the air;
A thousand thousand silvery lyres
Resounded far and near:
Methought, the very breath I breathed
Was full of sparks divine,
And all my heather-couch was wreathed
By that celestial shine!
And, while the wide Earth echoing rung
To their strange minstrelsy,
The little glittering spirits sung,
Or seemed to sing, to me.
‘O mortal! mortal! let them die;
Let time and tears destroy,
That we may overflow the sky
With universal joy!
[…]
‘To thee the world is like a tomb,
A desert’s naked shore;
To us, in unimagined bloom,
It brightens more and more!
‘And could we lift the veil, and give
One brief glimpse to thine eye,
Thou wouldst rejoice for those that live,
Because they live to die.’
[…]
The composer writes:
I selected the six poems which comprise the text of this song-cycle to outline a spiritual journey from a mood of regret for the past to one of defiant optimism. In the first poem, ‘Harp’, the poet invokes a past happiness that she feels is lost beyond recall. The second song, ‘Sleep’, explores this mood more intensely. The poet, finding no consolation in sleep, longs only for the final sleep of death. A glimpse of a possible life beyond death is provided by ‘Oracle’, a dialogue in which a child, consulted by the poet, sees the future as a blinding vision of eternity. ‘Storm’ unleashes the forces of nature, in complete surrender to which the poet seeks escape from all sense of personal identity. In the central image of ‘Caged Bird’ Emily Brontё sees a symbol of her own captive spirit, longing to ‘soar away’ to eternal freedom. The final poem, ‘Immortality’ [‘the last lines my sister Emily ever wrote’ according to Charlotte Brontё], is a visionary affirmation of a life beyond and outside time. It constitutes both the goal and the climax of the cycle in its rejection of the material world in favour of a mystical faith transcending the dogmatic limitations of organized religion.
Harp of wild and dream like strain
When I touch thy strings
Why dost thou repeat again
Long forgotten things?
Harp in other earlier days
I could sing to thee
And not one of all my lays
Vexed my memory
But now if I awake a note
That gave me joy before
Sounds of sorrow from thee float
Changing evermore
Yet still steeped in memory’s dyes
They come sailing on
Darkening all my summer skies
Shutting out my sun
Sleep brings no joy to me
Remembrance never dies,
My soul is given to misery
And lives in sighs
Sleep brings no hope to me
In soundest sleep they come,
And with their doleful imagery
Deepen the gloom
Sleep brings no strength to me
No power renewed [to] brave
I only sail a wilder sea
A darker wave
Sleep brings no friend to me
To soothe and aid to bear
They all gaze on how scornfully
And I despair
Sleep brings no wish to knit
My harassed heart beneath
My only wish is to forget
In endless sleep of death
(Maconchy)
Tell me tell me smiling child
What the past is like to thee?
An Autumn evening soft and mild
With a wind that sighs mournfully
Tell me what is the present hour?
A green and flowery spray
Where a young bird sits gathering its power
To mount and fly away
And what is the future happy one?
A sea beneath a cloudless sun
A mighty glorious dazzling sea
Stretching into infinity
High waving heather ’neath stormy blasts bending
Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars
Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending
Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending
Man’s spirit away from its drear dungeon sending
Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars
All down the mountain sides wild forests lending
One mighty voice to the life giving wind
Rivers their banks in the jubilee rending
Fast through the valleys a reckless course wending
Wider and deeper their waters extending
Leaving a desolate desert behind
Shining and lowering and swelling and dying
Changing for ever from midnight to noon
Roaring like thunder like soft music sighing
Shadows on shadows advancing and flying
Lightning bright flashes the deep gloom defying
Coming as swiftly and fading as soon
And like myself lone wholly lone
It sees the day’s long sunshine glow
And like myself it makes its moan
In unexhausted woe
Give we the hills our equal prayer
Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea
I ask for nothing further here
Ah could my hand unlock its chain
How gladly would I with it soar
And ne’er regret and ne’er complain
To see its shining eyes no more
But let me think that if today
It pines in cold captivity
Tomorrow both shall soar away
Eternally entirely Free
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast,
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me has rest
As I Undying Life, have power in thee
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above
Though Earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed