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EMILY BRONTE:
‘No coward soul is mine’
Apart from Keats sickening and dying prematurely and Hopkins being
completely unknown during his lifetime, there is no sadder chapter in
English literary history than the obscure life and early death in her
father’s humble parsonage in Yorkshire, of Emily Bronte (1818-1848).
Yet, much as we may ourselves may be inclined to pity her plight, the
evidence of her poetry is that self-pity formed no part whatsoever of
her personality. Indeed, it reveals her to have been possessed of
resources of character in excess even of what might be expected of the
author of so powerful a novel as “Wuthering Heights”.
Emily’s poetic efforts began in childhood when she, together with her
younger sister, Anne, created an imaginary world and history of the
island of Gondal in response to her elder sister Charlotte’s and brother
Branwell’s chronicles of their imaginary kingdom of Angria. The poems
were what Emily attributed to her mythical characters, and it was
evidently here that she began to form her imaginative and expressive
powers as well as that fortitude in the face of misfortune with which
the protagonists of the fantasy were endowed. These “Gondal” poems
continued to be written in later life alongside the personal poetry, and
are almost as important in the assessment of her poetic personality.
Claustrophobic nature
All that the sisters had for their literary and leisurely activity
was a tiny closet adjoining their bedrooms. The one escape Emily had,
aside from her vivid imagination, from the claustrophobic nature of her
domestic conditions was the vast moorland at the edge of which the
village of Haworth perched. “A little and a lone green lane That opened
on a common wide; A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain Of mountains
circling every side; A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, So sweet, so
soft, so hushed an air...This was the scene; I knew it well...Even as I
stood with raptured eye, Absorbed in bliss so deep and dear, My hour of
rest had fleeted by, And back came labour, bondage, care.” (‘a Little
While’).
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Emily
Bronte |
The decadent romanticism of the diction notwithstanding, eg.
“distant, dreamy, dim” and “so sweet, so soft, so hushed”, the vigorous
rhythm and rapturous tone aptly capture the magic of what was actually
an envisioning of the moor as she rested from her household chores. Like
Wordsworth’s daffodils, the moor would evidently “flash upon that inward
eye which is the bliss of solitude.”
In “Wuthering Heights”, Catherine relates a dream in which she found
herself in heaven and wept to come back to earth, whereupon the angels
angrily flung her back onto the heath and she awoke sobbing for joy.
This passionate attachment to the earth was actually Emily’s own, as the
following lines show: “Often rebuked, yet always back returning To those
first feelings that were born in me...I’ll walk where my own nature
would be leading...Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side....What have those lonely
mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell: The earth that wakes one
human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of heaven and hell.”
(‘Stanza’) This is Emily’s version of Nature echoing, as for Wordsworth,
“the still, sad music of humanity,” the Earth representing the whole
bitter-sweet range of human experience which she accepts as completely
fulfilling the yearning of the soul.
Day Dream
Ultimately, this acceptance extends to death itself. And here we
realise that Emily’s experience of Nature, though less expansively
expressed than Wordsworth’s, is more intense and metaphysical. It
enables her to accept death as the logical outcome of her communion with
Nature and its oblivion as the only way in which she can finally merge
with it. In “Day Dream’ we see her coming to this realisation after an
initially bitter contemplation of the transience of summer’s splendour:
“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 would’st rejoice for those that live, Because they live to
die.”
And in ‘When I Shall Sleep”, the acceptance is complete. “Oh, for the
time when I shall sleep Without identity, And never care how rain may
steep, Or snow may cover me! No promised heaven these wild desires Could
all, or half fulfill; No threatened hell, with quenchless fires Subdue
this quenchless will!....Oh, for the time when in my breast Their
struggles will be o’er! Oh, for the day when I shall rest, And never
suffer more!” The fervency of tone and urgency of rhythm come through
despite the tendency to emotionalism.
We are reminded of Wordsworth’s dead child; “No motion has she now,
no force; She neither hears nor sees, Rolled round in earth’s diurnal
course With rocks and stones and trees!” Wordsworth never gives the
impression of himself personally aspiring to that condition, but Emily
does.
Yet she does not, like Hamlet, simply view death as “a consummation
devoutly to be wished” or, like Mozart (in a letter to his father) “as
the true goal of our lives...the true and best friend of mankind.”
Heavens glories
She is aware of a power both within and external to her that enables
her to overcome death itself while accepting its inevitability. This is
the message of her last and greatest poem, “No Coward Soul is Mine”; “No
coward soul is mine, No trembler in the worlds storm-troubled sphere; I
see Heavens glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from
fear....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 wert 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 destroyed.”
Here there is not only a finer control over, but a remarkable power
of, expression as Emily describes the force or agency that has sustained
her throughout her remarkable inner life, which is clearly the poetic
imagination itself. Like Nature it is larger than her and will survive
her, but at the same time, like Nature, it will enable her to survive
the fear of death and hope in its regenerative power.
In ‘To Imagination’, she confirms the identity of Imagination as her
true friend, inspiration and liberator: “Thy kind voice calls me back
again O my true friend,, I am not lone While thou can speak with such a
tone!...But thou art ever there to bring The hovering visions 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...With never-failing thankfulness I welcome thee, benignant power,
Sure solacer of human cares And brighter hope when hope despairs.”
Spiritual dimension
The evidence of the poetry, then, is that “Wuthering Heights”, the
work for which Emily is celebrated, does not represent her true creative
potential. She poured out her imaginative power into this extraordinary
story of unyielding passion and achieved a work of art that ranks her as
one of the greatest novelists in English literature. Yet, she did not
achieve in it the “objective correlative” of her own even more
extraordinary personality. For this had an ultimately spiritual
dimension that is absent in the novel, a nobility of soul that her
fictional characters could not, as she had constituted them, aspire to.
It is in her poetry, though comparatively slight in volume and
occasionally uneven in expression, that this unique personality is fully
expressed and understandable. For this reason it seems reasonable that
the poems should enjoy recognition at least equivalent to the novel.
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