#WingedWordsWindsday: 03/09/2022 -- Emily Bronte

 WINGED WORDS WINDSDAY

Compiled by Rob Chappell (@RHCLambengolmo)

Vol. 1, No. 19: March 9, 2022

 

 

Celebrating Women’s History Month

Episode #2: Emily Brontë

 

Editor’s Note

                Continuing with my series of features in celebration of Women’s History Month, this week I’m sharing some poems by Emily Brontë (1818-1848), one of the famous trio of literary Brontë sisters whose novels have become classics of English literature. Emily is perhaps best known for her novel Wuthering Heights (1847), which many of my readers may recall from their high school English classes. Emily’s poems, however, are equally as brilliant as her novel. Known as a “mystic of the moors,” Emily incorporated her love of the natural world into her poetry, creating numinous verses that still resonate with beauty and power in our 21^st-century world.

 

Excerpt from Charlotte’s Brontë’s Preface to the 1850 Edition of Wuthering Heights

                My sister's [Emily's] disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favored and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she know them: knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but WITH them, she rarely exchanged a word.

 

Pages from one of Emily Brontë’s notebooks, showing two poems composed during her younger years, when she and her two sisters, Anne and Charlotte, created a complex legendarium around Gondal, an imaginary Pacific Island nation. (Image Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Selected Poems by Emily Brontë

 

“High Waving Heather”

 

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 their 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 forever 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.

 

“Moonlight, Summer Moonlight”

 

'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,

All soft and still and fair;

The solemn hour of midnight

Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

 

But most where trees are sending

Their breezy boughs on high,

Or stooping low are lending

A shelter from the sky.

 

And there in those wild bowers

A lovely form is laid;

Green grass and dew-steeped flowers

Wave gently round her head.

Portrait of Emily Brontë by her brother Branwell, painted in 1834. (Image Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

 

“No Coward Soul Is Mine”

 

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,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

 

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.

 

“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,

While 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!

 

Further Reading

·         https://www.bronte.org.uk/ (The Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum)

·         https://bronteblog.blogspot.com/ (The Brontë Blog)

·         https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Poems_of_Emily_Bront%C3%AB (The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë)