For some reason, this morning, along with the sensation of lightness and well-being, I found myself reciting, in my head, Emily Bronte’s poem “Often Rebuked”. It possibly is my favorite poem. Not in terms of its literary value, or its lasting power, or anything like that. It is my favorite poem in a very narcisstic sense. I read it, and feel that it is coming FROM me. It is IN me. She is speaking ME to me. I sound like a lunatic. It’s not even 9 a.m.
“Often Rebuked” is one of those poems which, regardless of the poet’s talent with language, image, metaphor, provides a shock of recognition. “I know that…I know that…that is me…” Here’s the poem (I know it by heart):
Often Rebuked
Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:
Today, I will not seek the shadowy region:
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.
I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray 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 center both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
