Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
Portrait by Branwell Brontë
A paper and poetry reading given at St Peter’s Church,
Eastern Hill, Melbourne as part of the series ‘Poets and the Faith’ on Tuesday
the 13th of August 2024.
“Darkness was overtraced on every face”
Darkness was overtraced on every face
Around clouded with storm and ominous gloom
In Hut or hall smiled out no resting place
There was no resting place but one – the tomb
All our hearts were the mansions of distress
And no one laughed and none seemed free from care
Our children felt their fathers’ wretchedness
Our homes one all were shadowed with despair
It was not fear that made the land so sad
The great majority of poems written by Emily Brontë are
short expressions of desire, solitude, separation, isolation, hostility,
distress, loss, longing, anguish, tempest, hopelessness, suffering.
Readers know about these states of being from her
novel. It is no secret to anyone in the world that ‘Wuthering Heights’ is one
of the great shockwaves of English Literature, a work that was lightning and
thunder upon its appearance in early Victorian England. That is how the novel
was first received and no amount of Kate Bush fantasy gothic romance can veil
from the receptive reader Emily Brontë‘s wild and seemingly unredeemed cast of
characters, their own isolation, cruelty and self-absorption; their longings,
desires, and sometimes brutal honesty. A lifelong fan of the novel was the
Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne, who called ‘Wuthering Heights’ “essentially
and definitely a poem in the fullest and most positive sense of the term.” (Brownson)
Which I take to mean, the severity of her story is turned into redemptive
vision by the power of her own language. It is a vision unto itself, whatever
we make of it. So this is Emily. Charlotte Brontë once described her sister as
“a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove.” Yet we know this is not the end of
the story, because we have poems like ‘To Imagination’.
To Imagination
When weary with the long day’s care,
And
earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost and ready to despair,
Thy kind
voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
Whilst thou canst speak with such a tone!
So hopeless is the world without,
The world
within I doubly prize;
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold
suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty.
What matters it, that, all around,
Danger,
and guilt, and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom’s bound
We hold a
bright, untroubled sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?
Reason, indeed, may oft complain
For
Nature’s sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart how vain
Its
cherished dreams must always be;
And truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:
But, thou art ever there, to bring
The
hovering vision back, and breathe
New glories o’er the blighted spring,
And call
a lovelier Life from Death,
And whisper, with a voice divine,
Of real worlds, as bright as thine.
I trust not to thy phantom bliss,
Yet
still, in evening’s quiet hour,
With never-failing thankfulness,
I
welcome thee, Benignant Power;
Sure solacer of human cares,
And sweeter hope, when hope despairs!
This poem, with its exemplary calmness of voice and
rhyme pattern repeatedly finding resolution inside each verse, speaks up
against the near despair we find elsewhere in her writing. The words declare
the saving value of the imagination. Imagination images the world anew, serving
creativity. Imagination has the power to shape and unify thought. This poem is
Coleridge’s influential theory writ intimately, one we have heard about already
from Rowan Williams in his presentation on R.S. Thomas. Imagination is superior
to Fancy, those products that can all too readily be overridden by truth.
Still, for Emily, although imagination itself
may prove “vain” at times, and she cannot trust its “phantom bliss”, yet
she gives thanks for imagination, calls it a “Benignant Power” and “solacer”, a
source of hope.
An elementary fact about the Brontë sisters is that
they grew up, indeed lived the greater length of their lives, in a parsonage. The
Yorkshire moors bring out internal turmoil in Emily, but may also be heard as
her sacred place of release and freedom; at times, the landscape is even where
she finds intimations of paradise. The sisters lost their mother at an early
age, then to be raised by her sister and their father, the Revd Patrick Brontë,
an Anglican clergyman of Calvinist persuasion influenced by the Methodist
movement. While this sounds austere and strict, the biographies balance this
upbringing with two pluses that inform their writing at every turn: a strong
sense of moral responsibility and an unbounded encouragement of the creative
mind. Free enquiry was encouraged. This emphasis on personal and social
improvement, it can confidently be understood, came from their homelife in
Haworth in Yorkshire.
Last Lines
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 wither’d weeds.
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,
To waken
doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely
anchor’d on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
With
wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades
and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though
earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And thou
were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is
not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou –
Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroy’d.
Readers over two centuries have arrived at various conclusions about Emily Bronte. She is a pantheist, a stoic, a sceptic, a Romantic, a post-Romantic, an enthusiast… Like Shakespeare, she is the object of any number of projections, often based on the reader’s own wishes or prejudices. Let me join this throng of projections with my own. ‘No coward soul is mine’ is a most distinctive breakthrough in her thinking, written in extremis as she faces death at the age of 30. It is the culmination, for this reason, of her poetic journey. One critic says the words “show in themselves her dominating character, the intrepidity of her thought, and the wing-force of her poetry.” ((Dimnet 120)
What has been called Emily’s “singular self-possession” (Dimnet 120) must be placed beside her disdainful dismissal of “the thousand creeds/ That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain.” Clues to this seeming contradiction are found in this biographical story.
‘Outside the family circle, Emily was only once heard to comment on the subject of religion, and her remark was as laconic as it was typical. [A friend] Mary Taylor has related how she once told Charlotte, ‘… that some one had asked me what religion I was of (with a view of getting me for a partisan) and that I had said that that was between God and me. Emily (who was lying on the hearthrug) exclaimed. “That’s right.” This was all I ever heard Emily say on religious subjects.’ (Lock 368)
Religion here means all the various versions of
Christian church and practice available in the British Isles at the time, and
all other beliefs secular and otherwise, and we can conclude that Emily won’t
have anything to do with any of it! This story needs to be read in the light of
other reports that when Emily was present in the Brontë box-pew in church, “she
would sit with her back to the pulpit ... bolt upright … as motionless as a
statue.” (Lock 368-9) It needs to be remembered that her father was the preacher,
but even more interesting is the general perception then and since that Emily
was the child most like Patrick Brontë. They had more in common than the others. In other words, Emily is not
dismissing “the thousand creeds” as such; she is rejecting anything in religion,
anything at all, that comes between us and God. And I will suggest, that the
phrase “unutterably vain”, a recurring line of thought in Emily’s writing,
derives directly from the Book of Ecclesiastes, where all is vanity, saith the
Preacher.
“I see heaven's glories shine and faith shines equal, arming me from fear,” she writes late in her short life. Restlessly and firmly, Brontë words her experience, prioritising imagination, nature, and God.
Emily Brontë Sources
Works
The complete poems. Edited with an introduction by
Janet Gezari. Penguin Books, 1992
The night is darkening round me. Penguin Books, 2015
Also
Juliet
Barker. ‘Emily Jane Brontë”, in Oxford dictionary of national
biography,
volume 7, pp. 848-852. Oxford University Press, 2004
Siobhan
Craft Brownson. Emily Brontë, 1818-1848.
At Poetry Foundation website, Chicago: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-bronte
Ernest
Dimnet. The Brontë sisters. Jonathan Cape, 1927
Juliet Gardiner. The illustrated letters of the
Brontës. Batsford, 2021
Margaret
Lane. The Brontë story : a reconsideration of Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte
Brontë. Heinemann, 1953
John Lock
& W. T. Dixon. A man of sorrows :
the life, letters and times of the Rev. Patrick Brontë 1777-1861. Nelson, 1965
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