The Books: Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats: Emily Brontë

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Charlotte Brontë first read her sister Emily’s poems in 1845. She describes her reaction:

Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me, — a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, not at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear, they had also a peculiar music — wild, melancholy, and elevating.

The three Brontë sisters (and their dissipated brother Branwell) are often lumped together: The Brontës(TM). The myth of their upbringing started very early on, almost during their lives. Part of the responsibility for that myth (the crazy creative isolation they lived in, all of the things we know about them) is laid at the feet of Mrs. Gaskell, who wrote the superb The Life of Charlotte Brontë, a book still in print, a book that has never gone out of print since its publication in 1857 (very unusual, especially with biographies, which often sway with the tide of trend – Mrs. Gaskell’s has lasted). Elizabeth Gaskell knew the Brontës, so her book has a gossipy self-important tone at times, but it is an invaluable resource for any Brontë fan. However, there is some myth-making going on. Mrs. Gaskell got there first, so her version has lasted.

The massive The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, attempted to rectify Mrs. Gaskell’s long-lasting version. Barker lived only miles from Haworth, her whole life, and so writes with knowledge and personal experience about that region of the world. The footnotes alone would exhaust a casual reader. The book is over 1000 pages long. But it’s a certainly a must-read, a very important book. One of Barker’s point is that the isolation so remarked upon by Mrs. Gaskell was a bit of an exaggeration, a romanticization by a city-woman not accustomed to rural life. The Brontës were not eccentric loners, all alone on the wild heath. The village was nearby, they had much concourse with their fellow humans. It was not isolation that made them geniuses. They were geniuses because they were geniuses. This is Barker’s thesis, and she goes through the material with a meticulous and relentless specificity, leaving no stone unturned: deeds to land, minutes of community meetings, log-books … Like I said, the footnotes are the most daunting part of that book. You have to get into a groove with them. Mrs. Gaskell’s book stood for over a century as the version of the family (again, amazing, and speaks well to the readability of the book, and also its hypnotic power), and Barker was taking on Goliath with her own project. Regardless of what is true, the Brontës continue to fascinate. I suppose they always will. I mean, Charlotte and Emily alone would be extraordinary, but then you throw Anne into the mix, and you wonder what the hell was going on in that household.

Mrs. Gaskell gives a picture of life at Haworth and the Brontë children:

They were grave and silent beyond their years; subdued, probably, by the presence of serious illness in the house; for, at the time which my informant speaks of, Mrs. Brontë was confined to the bedroom from which she never came forth alive. ‘You would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures. Maria would shut herself up’ (Maria, but seven!) ‘in the children’s study with a newspaper, and be able to tell one everything when she came out; debates in parliament, and I don’t know what all. She was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother. But there never were such good children. I used to think them spiritless, they were so different to any children I had ever seen. In part, I set it down to a fancy Mr. Brontë had of not letting them have flesh-meat to eat. It was from no wish for saving, for there was plenty and even waste in the house, with young servants and no mistress to see after them; but he thought that children should be brought up simply and hardily: so they had nothing but potatoes for their dinner; but they never seemed to wish for anything else; they were good little creatures. Emily was the prettiest.’

Charlotte and Emily are clearly the most well-known (for good reason, they are superior writers to Anne), but if you hold up their two most well-known books beside one another: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, you would be hard-pressed to find the similarities. They are individuals. They are not imitations of one another. They are not two versions of the same book. Both have a darkness at the heart of them, I suppose … a sense that society and civilization is a thin veneer, indeed. It always annoys me when they, in turn, are lumped together with Jane Austen, as though there are any similarities whatsoever between any of them, except their gender. Please: don’t lump women writers together like that. It shows you have no understanding of literature and “voice”. There is about as much similarity between Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice as there is between Great Expectations and Moby Dick. Meaning: none. Two males wrote the last two books. Big whup. It is a meaningless comparison, and I find it personally insulting. It’s not just the writing styles that are distinct, but it is the spirit behind every word. No two real artists express themselves in the same way. You could not imagine Elizabeth Bennett charging off across the moors to be with Heathcliff on the other side any more than you could imagine Cathy behaving herself in the Darcy drawing room. No comparison.

Emily Brontë “makes no sense” and that’s the best part about her. Where did she come from? Who was she? Where did Wuthering Heights come from? (My thoughts on the book here.) I think that those who see that book as a passionate romantic love story perhaps are remembering it a bit dimly, or only remember parts of it. I recently re-read it and thought it was an unpleasant reading experience from beginning to end (this is a compliment), a fever-dream of revenge and thwarted life, the bloody hand at the window, the memory of the life that once raged across those moors, now long underneath the ground. It is a bleak and hopeless book. It is a book without God. There is no redemption, no peace – not even after death. Wounded spirits haunt the earth, crying out for release, still. Yes, Heathcliff and Cathy love each other. But it is not a love that could survive in civilized world. You could never imagine those two setting up house together. No way. Heathcliff and Cathy are far more likely to go on a cross-county killing spree, like Kit and Holly in Badlands, than to invest in a china tea service and put their energies into decorating the nursery. It is laughable to even think of those two raging IDS doing anything other than trying to please themselves. None of this is a criticism of the book, by the way. I just think it’s an accurate description of its dark energy, its uncivilized yearnings. It’s hopeless from the start. It’s not that Love doesn’t work out for the two of them. It’s that they, in and of themselves, are somehow unfit to live. Holly and Kit could never “go on” and be normal. Love ruins Heathcliff and Cathy, but they were childhood friends, best buddies, and there is something infantile in their bond. It is as though once they met, they got “stuck” in a place and time, and never moved forward. Who was the woman who wrote such a thing?

Emily is an enigma, even more so than Charlotte (although perhaps less so than Branwell). She was not a social person. She related better to animals than to people. Nature was her life’s blood. But more than that … what it represented: Freedom. Her soul was free, but it required the freedom of her surroundings. She seemed to need that reflection of freedom in order to have the strength to keep going. Put her in an unfamiliar restricted surrounding, and she wilted.

Charlotte wrote about her sister:

My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; — out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side, her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was – liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices), was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning, when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form,a nd failing strength, threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die, if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall.

She suffered greatly. I have thought that she might have been on an Autism spectrum. She knew who she was, and suffered greatly when she tried to “fit in”. No weakling, she, however. Charlotte said that Emily was “stronger than a man and simpler than a child”, and this speaks to her individuality. It was not that she didn’t want to compromise, it was that she literally couldn’t.

A family friend gossiped about Emily to Mrs. Gaskell, saying:

She never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals.

(I think of Peter Bogdanovich’s comment to Arthur Miller about how Marilyn Monroe seemed to get along best with children and animals. Arthur Miller responded, “Yes, well, they didn’t sneer at her.”)

It is well-known that the Brontë children amused themselves by making up elaborate stories, a collaborative event, and coming out with newspapers and serialized manuscripts (written in handwriting so small that it is nearly microscopic). Here is an excerpt from their self-published Little Magazine, “put out” in 1829. This was written by Charlotte. The Little Magazine was formed to describe their activities/plays/games:

June the 31st, 1829
The play of ‘The Islanders’ was formed in December, 1827, in the following manner. One night, about the time when the cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snow-storms, and high piercing night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced. A long pause succeeded, which was at last broken by Branwell saying in a lazy manner, “I don’t know what to do.” This was echoed by Emily and Anne.
Tabby. “Wha ya may go t’bed.”
Branwell. “I’d rather do anything than that.”
Charlotte. “Why are you so glum to-night, Tabby? Oh! suppose we had each an island of our own.”
Branwell. “If we had I would choose the Island of Man.”
Charlotte. “And I would choose the Isle of Wight.”
Emily. “The Isle of Arran for me.”
Anne. “And mine should be Guernsey.”
We then chose who should be chief men in our islands. Branwell chose John Bull, Ashley Cooper, and Leigh Hunt; Emily, Walter Scott, Mr. Lockhart, Johnny Lockhart; Anne, Michael Sadler, Lord Bentinck, Sir Henry Halford; I chose the Duke of Wellington and two sons, Christopher North and Co., and Mr. Abernethy. Here our conversation was interrupted by the, to us, dismal sound of the clock striking seven, and we were summoned off to bed. The next day we added many others to our list of men, till we got almost all the chief men of the kingdom. After this, for a long time, nothing worth noticing occurred. In June, 1828, we erected a school on a fictitious island, which was to contain 1,000 children. The manner of the building was as follows. The Island was fifty miles in circumference, and certainly appeared more like the work of enchantment than anything real.

They were wild and free and must have had a lot of fun. They were educated, certainly, but, as Ian Ousby remarks in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English:

The girls’ real education, however, was at the Haworth parsonage, where they had the run of their father’s books, and were thus nurtured on the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Sir Walter Scott and many others. They enthusiastically read articles on current affairs, lengthy reviews and intellectual disputes in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The Edinburgh Review. They also ranged freely in Aesop and in the colourfully bizarre world of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets“ writes about the Brontes:

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816-55, a.k.a. Currer Bell and, married, as Charlotte Nicholls), Emily (1818-48, a.k.a. Ellis Bell) and Anne (1920-49, a.k.a. Acton Bell), shared a poetic project. When they were girls Emily and Anne composed the Gondal sagas. Charlotte and her brother, Branwell, composed the Angria sagas, and these fantasies continued to engage them well into their early adulthood. Poems attached to the stories, and the figures of the sagas, with their wild passions, never quite died. The poems are often the fruit of their big gestures, their brimming hearts and earthquake heartbreaks. This does not mean the three women are a composite creature, what R.E. Pritchard calls a Brontësaurus. In their verse, though Emily is by far the best of the three, there are differences of emotional intensity and of prosodic and formal skills.

All three are gothicized Romantics. Their settings are often nocturnal, wintry – the long dark winters of the Yorkshire Moors around Haworth, where they were born and lived through a litany of bereavements (two elder sisters, their mother), and where they received their education and wrote tirelessly and voluminously. The weathers and settings reflect extreme states of mind and emotion, and the forms are somber: balladic and hymn stanzas for the most part. The diction is restricted if not restrained, the range of intense emotions is confined.

Their world was not wide. Charlotte went furthest, becoming a teacher and in 1842 traveling with Emily to Belgium, where both attended a finishing school and Charlotte endured an unhappy romance. They come home in 1843 and three years later, with Anne, published Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, of which two copies were sold in the first year. The names were chosen to neutralize their genders in the public world. The critical and commercial failure of the verse impelled all three young women into fiction.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, after reading Mrs. Gaskell’s biography (it was one of her favorites), wrote of Emily:

Emily Brontë is a mysterious figure. The impression left of her from reading The Life is not a pleasant one. She seemed to have no friends. Yet Charlotte loved her devotedly. The picture drawn of her stubborn gallant senseless heroic fight against death is a wonderful one. Nothing in literature is more poignant and pathetic than her sudden useless capitulation at the last moment — ‘If you call a doctor, I will see him now.’ Too late — too late … Her genius was really greater than Charlotte’s — and even narrower. But the world did not know it when she died. Strange Emily Brontë.

It is difficult to imagine the grief endured by Charlotte during the years of 1848 and 1849, when all of her surviving siblings perished. Branwell died of tuberculosis in September 1848. Emily caught a cold while at her brother’s funeral, and died in December 1848, refusing medical help until the very end when she said, “If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now.” But she died only a few hours later. Anne was devastated by these losses, and came down with influenza in December of 1848, following the death of Emily. She struggled on until finally succumbing in May 1849. I have three siblings myself, and the horror is inconceivable.

In November of 1848, Charlotte wrote a heart-wrenching letter to a friend:

I told you Emily was ill in my last letter. She has not rallied yet. She is very ill. I believe, if you were to see her, your impression would be that there is no hope. A more hollow, wasted, pallid aspect I have not beheld. The deep tight cough continues; the breathing after the least exertion is a rapid pant; nd these symptoms are accompanied by pains in the chest and side. Her pulse, the only time she allowed it to be felt, was found to beat 115 per minute. In this state she resolutely refuses to see a doctor; she will give no explanation of her feelings, she will scarcely allow her feelings to be alluded to. Our position is, and has been for some weeks, exquisitely painful. God only know how all this is to terminate. More than once, I have been forced boldly to regard the terrible event of her loss as possible, and even probable. But nature shrinks from such thoughts. I think Emily seems the nearest thing to my heart in this world.

Charlotte mourns, in another letter, following Emily’s death:

Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny – more powerful than sportive – found in such traits material whence it wrought creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catharine. Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done. If the auditor of her work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable – of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell [Emily’s pseudonym] would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree – loftier, straighter, wider-spreading – and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and experience alone could work; to the influence of other intellects she was not amenable.

Emily was a tough cookie, man.

Like the memorable Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë was fierce in her sense of Self (with a capital S), and WILL. She had to have been a pretty formidable person. I wonder what she was like.

Her poems are clearly the best of the Brontë bunch. One of the things that really comes across in her work is the free and confident use of the “I”. It is a point of view, a voice, an inner monologue. Many poets (especially then) did not know how to use the “I”. 20th century poets use the “I” too much, which makes so many current poems insignificant, like little diary entries with no universal impact. But there is something so powerful about someone with a voice, and someone who speaks directly from that individual voice. I always get that sense from Emily Brontë. Her voice is her own. Her poems read like soliloquies, you can almost …. almost … hear her. Even disregarding the fact of her siblings (whom she is always compared to, unfortunately, which gives her place in the “canon” a strange resonance … again, with the “lumping together” of the “Bronteë” … Unfair), Emily’s verses are powerful stuff. A “sense of self” cannot be counterfeited. You know the real deal when you see it. Emily’s verses have it.

Welsh novelist Stevie Davies writes of Emily:

Sealed in her art-world, the moor strategically placed for escape above the house, no domesticating and limiting mother to weaken her capacity for identification with whatever sex she chose to impersonate at a particular moment, polite society at a safe distance, and a father who seems to have selected her as an honorary boy to be trusted with fire-arms in defence of the weak, Emily Brontë’s life exemplifies a rough joy in itself, its war-games, its word games and its power to extend its own structuring vision out upon the given world.

Yes!! “a rough joy in itself, its war-games, its word games”. That is just just right.

Here is Charlotte again on finding Emily’s poems:

My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed: it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication.

A fascinating glimpse into who Emily Brontë was. Of all of the sisters, Emily is the one I wish most to know. Although she probably would just stride ahead of me on our walk on the moors, leaving me in the dust, refusing to talk to me because I was ruining her communion with solitude and the spheres of creativity and fantasy spinning in her head. Who knows. She continues to fascinate.

Michael Schmidt writes of Emily’s poetry (and I think he is right on):

Emily, like her characters, loved liberty and the open spaces of the moors. She insisted on her own patterns of life… The will is the force her poems celebrate, a will that knows its limitations, as in the poem “I am the only being whose doom”… There is intense life in the verse of Emily Brontë, the kind of life that strains the forms and breaks them into new configurations. As in her fiction, so to a lesser extent in her verse, form is a means and not an end. Her technical versatility is in no way exemplary. Another poet could learn only one valuable lesson from what she does, and that is the ways in which form lives when it is driven urgently by powerful impulses, and how when that urgency ends a poem should stop.

A precursor of the confessional poets of the 20th century, Emily Brontë is the eternal wild card.

Here is my favorite of her poems. The first two lines of the second-to-last stanza have come up for me again and again in my life, when things have gotten really bad, when I wish for things to be different, when I mourn the life I will not have. I will then remember Emily’s words and, to quote Clifford Odets from Golden Boy, they “stiffen the space between my shoulder blades”. It takes courage to walk your own way. I need all the courage I can get, so thank you, Emily, across the centuries.

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 centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.