Anne Bronte’s Puzzling Farewell

Apologies to all who missed my Brontë blog post last Sunday, a combination of travelling and technical glitches meant that it somehow vanished into the ether never to return – although as it was about the Brontës’ French connections it may make a return next year on or around the date of Bastille Day.

I have now bid farewell (for now at least) to France, and my thoughts have turned to Anne Brontë’s poem “Farewell”, as it is one of Anne’s most enigmatic poems, as well as one of her most beautiful and seemingly heartfelt poems. I present it to you now:

“Farewell to thee! but not farewell
To all my fondest thoughts of thee:
Within my heart they still shall dwell;
And they shall cheer and comfort me.
O, beautiful, and full of grace!
If thou hadst never met mine eye,
I had not dreamed a living face
Could fancied charms so far outvie.
If I may ne’er behold again
That form and face so dear to me,
Nor hear thy voice, still would I fain
Preserve, for aye, their memory.
That voice, the magic of whose tone
Can wake an echo in my breast,
Creating feelings that, alone,
Can make my tranced spirit blest.
That laughing eye, whose sunny beam
My memory would not cherish less; —
And oh, that smile! whose joyous gleam
Nor mortal language can express.
Adieu, but let me cherish, still,
The hope with which I cannot part.
Contempt may wound, and coldness chill,
But still it lingers in my heart.
And who can tell but Heaven, at last,
May answer all my thousand prayers,
And bid the future pay the past
With joy for anguish, smiles for tears?”

It seems to me that this is one of Anne’s many poems about William Weightman, the handsome assistant curate of Haworth whom I and many others believe Anne Brontë loved. I think it likely that if Weightman had lived longer their love would have flourished and would likely have ended in marriage, after all what could be more natural at that time than for an assistant curate to marry the daughter of the experienced curate he served under? Alas it was not to be, for Weightman contracted cholera after visiting a sick parishioner and died on 6th September 1842.

This was a devastating blow for Anne and from that date she produced a succession of mourning poems about a lost love; she also produced her vision of an ideal man in her debut novel Agnes Grey: Edward Weston is an assistant curate who is kind, who loves animals, and who often visits and helps sick parishioners; in my mind there is no doubt that Weston is Anne’s portrait of Weightman.

So what is the enigma behind Anne Brontë’s poem “Farewell”, what is its puzzle? Surely, it belongs in the category of Weightman mourning poems? The difficulty is that we have no date to this poem, and Anne Brontë expert Mick Armitage and Anne Brontë biographer Edward Chitham have both suggested that it may have been written in late 1840 and predated the death of William Weightman.

If this is the case then it may have been written at a time of anguish for Anne when she was returning to work as a governess at Thorp Green Hall. In that reading of the poem the coldness may not be the coldness of the grave, but a coldness of attitude, a perceived indifference from Weightman about Anne’s departure? This is certainly a possibility, but it seems to me that the final two lines of the poem are a person talking about someone who has died. Their hope is a hope that heaven will remove their tears and replace them with joy; the hope which Anne often writes about, the hope that they will be reunited again in the next world. In my opinion, therefore, this is another poem written after the death of William Weightman.

Whatever its date, this is a fine poem full of the emotional power Anne generated so well in much of her verse. I hope you can join me next Sunday for another new Brontë blog post, farewell for now.