Poetry Corner

Happy International Women’s month!! To all you Poetic Pursuers merrily settling in for some literary exploration, I welcome you to take some time to reflect on the women in your life who have made an outsized impact.

Today, in honor of the women writers throughout history who have had to fight too hard to get their work to their readers, we are going to take a look at one of my favorite poets of all time: Emily Bronte.

In one word, Bronte was luminescent. The limited information known about her life and comparatively few surviving works creates a mysterious persona similar to that of the reclusive Emily Dickinson (something about the name, perhaps). After a childhood marked by the death of her mother and two older sisters as well as limited formal education, Bronte became homesick whenever leaving her wild moors of England, resulting in her spending limited time away from England.

And yet, despite the confines of her physical world, her mental landscape was diverse, variegated, passionate. Enjoying the comforts of home allowed her to focus on her writing, and other surviving pieces of her translations of Virgil’s Aeneid demonstrate that her mind was not an uneducated blank slate that miraculously birthed great writing. Instead of an unread homebody, Bronte was a master at virtual learning -- all of her days were remote days, and she used them to concoct the morally murky tale of Wuthering Heights that has captivated readers for generations as well as other stories about a mythical world called Gondal -- and, of course, poetry.

Using the categorization system that I introduced last month (Realistic Poetry, Stylized Poetry, Romantic Poetry, and Modern Poetry), I would say that most of Bronte’s poems fall under Romantic Poetry, as Bronte relies on metaphors that explain the complexities of human life through comparisons to the dramatic landscapes around her.

Despite the incredible caliber of her work, most of Bronte’s published poetry was in one slim volume co-written with her sisters that sold a grand total of two copies. What’s more, she had to publish under a man’s name -- ‘Ellis Bell’ -- in order to enter the world of publishing at all. I’ve always wondered if that gender barrier affected her work -- if the bars that halted her from entering the world of publishing were part of the reason she never strayed far from home.

Today, we are going to take a look at one of my favorite Bronte poems called “Often Rebuked, yet Always Back Returning”. In fact, I loved it so much that this was one of the poems that I performed at National Finals of Poetry Out Loud in 2019.

Let’s get to it:

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:

To-day, I will seek not 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.

WOAH. Poetry snaps for Ms. Bronte, if you please.

Take a look at the fourth line, where Bronte says that she will leave “busy chase of wealth and learning/for idle dreams of things that cannot be”. I’ve always loved that line, because I think it encapsulates Bronte’s approach to life: she wrote not because she wanted to be rich or because she wanted to be some great scholar, but because it was one of the “first feelings born with [her]”.

Then, she lets us see with brilliant imagery, her fears and insecurities that lurk in a “shadowy region” and rise “legion after legion” like an army coming to force her away from her version paradise on the English moor with her family and her wildness.

In the third stanza, we get to my favorite part of the poem. Bronte leads us up to a climax of emotion using one long, multi-phrasal sentence with the repetition of the phrase ‘And not’ (a technique called anaphora in fancy poet speak) to reject the paths of life that she is told she should want to pursue.

Whenever a poet repeats a line, it is for a very specific reason. So, when for the second time she says ‘I’ll walk’, I see it as her version of shouting from the rooftops with joy. After reving us up during the third stanza, her bold statement of “I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading” reaches Beyonce-like power.

Then, she brings us back down off the emotional heights with some clever use of punctuation including two colons and a semicolon; the effect being: slowing down the pace of your reading; this way, you read the lines like this: focusing on everything she has to say (see what I did there?).

The last six lines of the poem to me are when Bronte stops telling us that she is going to live her life, and she just goes out and lives it. Instead of chasing money or power, she gets up and follows the guide of her own nature to the ferny glens and the lonely mountains.

I have always liked to picture Bronte getting up from her writing desk in that last stanza, walking straight out of the words and into the hills.

Imagine how much better stuffy old English parlors would have been if this passionate, spirited voice had been given a seat at the table.

What did you think of Bronte’s life and her poem? Let us know by reaching out! We would love to hear your thoughts -- especially if they are different than the ones in this article, because the subjectivity of art is all the fun.

Whatever you think of her words, I hope you have a new appreciation for Bronte, a woman who refused to be cowed by the expectations of her time, and who wrote on despite the unequal world.

Well, poets, from my corner to yours, I’m wishing you peace, love, and poetry snaps!!

Poet’s Corner is written by Rose Hansen