Emily Brontë's Poems

LAST THINGS This page intentionally left blank Last Things Emily Brontë’s Poems JANET GEZARI 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Janet Gezari 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–929818–1 13579108642 For Sam and Vanessa She lives on a moor in the north. She lives alone. Spring opens like a blade there. Anne Carson, ‘The Glass Essay’ Acknowledgements This book has been a long time in the making, and I have many obligations that will go unmentioned. Like all those who write about the Brontes,¨ I have an immediate debt to the scholars who have come before me. They include Margaret Smith, whose magesterial edition of Charlotte Bronte’s¨ letters has become indispensable, and Juliet Barker, whose biography has made so much new information about the lives of the Brontes¨ available. I am grateful to Connecticut College for research grants supporting this project and to the American Bronte¨ Society and Theresa Connors, who invited me to address an enthusiastic and informed audience at the New York meeting in the spring of 2003, where I presented a shortened version of Chapter 7. Friends and colleagues who have read the typescript during its course of development and provided necessary advice and criticism include John Fyler, Charles Hartman, Willard Spiegelman, Christopher Ricks, and Vanessa Gezari. I am grateful to Oxford University Press for its dedication to the Brontes,¨ to Andrew McNeillie for his support for this project, and to the press’s two readers, Christine Alexander and Alison Chapman, who confirmed my sense of what I was doing and provided genuinely helpful criticism. A version of Chapter 3 appeared in ELH in 1999. The publishers wish to thank the Bronte¨ Parsonage Museum Library and the British Library for permission to reproduce holograph manu- scripts in their collections, and Faber and Faber Ltd. (UK and World) and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC (US) for permission to reprint ‘Emily Bronte’¨ from Collected Poems by Ted Hughes. Copyright 2003 by The Estate of Ted Hughes. Although every effort has been made to establish copyright and contact copyright holders prior to printing, the publishers would be pleased to rectify any omissions or errors brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity. This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Figures x ANoteonTexts xi 1. And First 1 2. Last Things 8 3. Fathoming ‘Remembrance’ 41 4. Outcomes and Endings 59 5. Fragments 79 6. The First Last Thing 106 7. Posthumous Bronte¨ 126 Notes 151 Bibliography 169 Index 179 List of Figures 1. ‘Stars’ 26 2. ‘Stars’ and ‘Death’ 27 3. ‘Cold clear and blue the morning heaven’ 60 4. ‘Why ask to know what date what clime’ 62 5. Poetical fragments 82 6. ‘The battle had passed from the height’ 100 ANoteonTexts All references to Emily Bronte’s¨ poems are to Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems, ed. Janet Gezari (London: Penguin Books, 1992). Poems are identified by their first lines, unless Emily Brontehas¨ provided titles for them. All references to Wuthering Heights are to the Clarendon Press edition of the novel: Wuthering Heights, ed. Hilda Marsden and Ian Jack (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). To facilitate locating references in this or other editions of Wuthering Heights, citations in parentheses in my text include book, chapter, and page number. This page intentionally left blank 1 And First And first an hour of mournful musing And then a gush of bitter tears And then a dreary calm diffusing Its deadly mist o’er joys and cares And then a throb and then a lightening And then a breathing from above And then a star in heaven brightening The star the glorious star of love When I edited Emily Brontë’s poems for the Penguin English Poets series, I was surprised to discover so many poems and poetical fragments that had the pure cry of genuine poetry, and then to see how little had been written about them. Although Brontë’s poems have always had their admirers—Virginia Woolf thought they might outlast Wuthering Heights—they have frequently been criticized as self-indulgent and self-dramatizing, crude and extravagant, or lacking in judgement and finish.¹ Like Emily Dickinson’s poems, many have been thought to begin better than they end, but unlike them, they have not been redeemed from neglect as forerunners of high modernism and are unlikely to be. Nor have they been restored to view by feminist critics, who have rehabilitated so much nineteenth-century poetry written by women. In my second chapter, I argue that it is the very uniqueness of Emily Brontë’s poems—the justice of Charlotte Brontë’s observation that no woman ever wrote poems like those her sister was writing—that makes them less interesting to recent feminist critics than the poems of either Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Mathilde Blind. My book seeks to redress this neglect by offering new ways to read Brontë’s poems and new reasons for wanting to read them. As a writer, Emily Brontë didn’t suffer from either an anxiety of influence or an anxiety of authorship. In her poems, she succeeded 2 And First in authorizing herself as the subject of her own experience, apparently without wondering whether that experience was eccentric and trivial or, contrarily, profoundly relevant to others. In life, she spoke infrequently but firmly, as in her curt response to Mary Taylor’s having said that her own religion was nobody’s business but hers and God’s: ‘That’s right’. She had no patience with what Keats called ‘poetry that has a palpable design on us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket’.² Her own poetry is always open-handed, although it continues to prove an elusive guide to what has interested most people: the daily life of the woman who produced it. The poems are at once personal and impersonal, in keeping with Yeats’s twin insights: ‘a poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work, out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness,’ and ‘all that is personal soon rots.’³ Their deep personality has to do with their faithfulness to Emily Brontë’s own experience of anguish and intoxication, but their deep impersonality is connected to her motive for writing them. ‘The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries,’ Woolf writes, contrasting her with Charlotte Brontë, but the ‘gigantic ambition’ to say something about relations between ‘the whole human race’ and ‘the eternal powers’.⁴ We can say of Emily Brontë what John Middleton Murry said of Thomas Hardy: her poems and novel are ‘not the record, but the culmination of an experience’ that contains ‘within it a reaction to the universe’.⁵ Brontë’s daily life, the life of the poems and her novel, was not a life of doing with others but a life of watching alone. What she did, apparently with great pleasure, was the repetitive, inconclusive work required in a household: brushing the carpets, kneading the bread, feeding the dogs.⁶ Anne Carson gives the most concise account I know of what she watched in ‘The Glass Essay’, Carson’s extraordinary poem about Brontë and the denuding lacerations of love. In the poem, Carson adopts Brontë’s usual spelling of ‘watch’ as ‘whach,’ which suggests that Brontë pronounced the word, often in contexts where inspiration is being sought, by breathing into it: She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night. She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather. Shewhachedthebarsoftime,whichbroke. She whached the poor core of the world, wide open.⁷ Kierkegaard located the core of romanticism in ‘absolute loneliness, where not a breath of wind stirs, where no distant baying of hounds And First 3 can be heard—and yet the trees incline to one another and repeat their childhood memories about when the nymphs lived in them, and ima- gination gorges itself in supreme enjoyment’.⁸ Supreme enjoyment—an unqualified affirmation of the joy of being alive—is the core of Brontë’s poems and is entirely compatible with her intimate knowledge of despair and her unflinching recognition of our human capacity for cruelty and ingratitude.

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