If you live in England you can’t fail to have noticed the unseasonably hot weather. The mercury is rising, and temperatures along with them, as June climate records fall like so many drips from the edges of ice cream cones. Thankfully a cooler snap is now starting, but in today’s post we’re going to look at two sublime ‘cold’ poems from the Brontë sisters.
Before we look at these poems, let’s ponder what life must have been like for the Brontës during a Haworth heatwave. There were no inflatable pools to jump into, nor even the opportunity to wear less clothing or to switch on an electric fan or two. One tool the Brontës did use was a parasol, and doubtless they would have used them to shelter themselves from the sun as they walked out on the moors or around Haworth on their everyday business. A number of their parasols have survived, so take a look at this beautiful collection on display in the Brontë Parsonage Museum:
Two of the finest poems by Emily and Anne Brontë, surely the finest Brontë poets, start with a cold reference. Emily’s poem ‘Remembrance’ was given especially high praise by F. R. Leavis, one of the most celebrated literary critics of the first half of the twentieth century. Referring to its first line rather than its title, Professor Leavis said: “Emily Brontë has hardly yet had her full justice as a poet… her Cold In The Earth is the finest poem in the 19th century part of The Oxford Book Of English Verse.”
Here is Emily’s coldly beautiful poem of loss and the endless cycle of nature, ‘Remembrance’:
“Cold in the earth – and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave?
Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover,
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover,
Thy noble heart forever, ever more?
Cold in the earth – and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring:
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers,
After such years of change and suffering!
Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world’s tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!
No later light has lightened up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.
But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.
Then did I check the tears of useless passion –
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten,
Down to that tomb already more than mine.
And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?”
Anne Brontë took a similar route in her cold poem ‘Night’. It is one of her briefest, one of her most personal and one of her most powerful poems, for surely the darling of her heart who is now cold in the grave referred to in the poem was her late, lamented love William Weightman, who had died three years before Anne’s composition of this poem:
“I love the silent hour of night,
For blissful dreams may then arise,
Revealing to my charmed sight
What may not bless my waking eyes!
And then a voice may meet my ear
That death has silenced long ago;
And hope and rapture may appear
Instead of solitude and woe.
Cold in the grave for years has lain
The form it was my bliss to see,
And only dreams can bring again
The darling of my heart to me.”
Whether you’re a sun worshipper or a cool cucumber, I hope you have a happy week ahead of you, and I hope you can join me next week for another new Brontë blog post.