The Solace of Emily Bronte's Poetry

Lawyer turned Emily Brontë scholar, Laura Inman, reveals the real solace offered by Brontë's poetry.

Many may not know that Emily Brontë, the nineteenth-century author of Wuthering Heights, was also a poet. Although her poetry is less well known than her novels, it is worth reading, particularly for those confronting grief.

Brontë, like her contemporaries, made death a major poetic topic; but Brontë went beyond her contemporaries to explore the complexity of death in an unprecedented way. It would seem that her interest in the topic came, at least in part, from her own experience. Brontë’s mother and two of her sisters died when she was a child, and as a young adult she experienced the death of her aunt, a surrogate mother to her, and those of two close friends.

Brontë considers the nature of sorrow in several poems. For instance, in an untitled poem dated April 1840, she compares the irrevocable loss of happiness resulting from grief to a change in the natural world:

Besides, the mist is half withdrawn;
The barren mountain-side lies bare;
And sunshine and awaking morn,
Paint no more golden visions there.
(no. 135, p. 141, ll. 5-8)

She also imagines a return to “old feelings” (no. 120, p. 130, l. 7) to be as impossible as reversing old age: “‘Tis like old age pretending / The softness of a child, / My altered, hardened spirit bending / To meet their fancies wild” (ll. 13-16). Brontë invokes sight and sound imagery to convey the feeling of shared sorrow and the difficulty of comprehending the reality of someone’s death:

And we must watch and wait and mourn
And half look out for their return,
And think their forms we see;
And fancy music in our ear,
Such as their lips could only pour;
And think we feel their presence near,
And start to find they are not here,
And never shall be more!
(no. 104, pp. 111-112, ll. 38-45)

Brontë tries to locate ports of consolation for those lost in the storm of grief in various ways. For instance, she considers the following methods: putting the death in perspective; invoking positive memories; suggesting that time heals; and even that there is escape in sleep, and through religion. However, not all these methods are considered successful.

The suggestion that sorrow is diminished by putting the loss in perspective, for example, by focusing on others having been spared, is thoroughly discounted. Brontë describes in one poem that the failure of one person to return from a war banishes any legitimate joy. She also repudiates memories as a comfort, as the speaker realizes in poem no.135:

It is too late to call thee now:
I will not nurse that dream again;
For every joy that lit my brow
Would bring its after-storm of pain.
(p. 141-142, ll. 1-4)
 
Also, Brontë queries whether it is better not to have loved than to have lost. The speaker in the following poem would prefer to strike a disadvantageous financial bargain of sorts than continue to suffer:
 
Yet could I with past pleasures
Past woe’s oblivion buy,
That by the death of my dearest treasures
My deadliest pains might die.
(no. 120, p. 130, ll. 17-20)

Even time – that most prescribed solace for many ills – is no ultimate solution, according to Brontë. In “Cold in the Earth,” (no.182, pp. 222-223), she offers the possibility that “Time’s all-wearing wave” (l. 4) has caused the speaker to forget the deceased. Yet this oblivion is only a tenuous condition, since the speaker is easily overwhelmed once again by grief by dwelling on memories – even after many years. Brontë observes that not only do memories and time fail to console, but grief defies sleep, where remembrance lurks in dreams.

As a poet in the Victorian era, and the daughter of a clergyman, we might expect Brontë to focus on God, and the prospect of an afterlife as ultimate consolation. Although in several poems Brontë describes a belief in eternity as giving strength and comfort for facing her own death, she does not depict religion as a sure comfort for grief.

Given that Brontë’s poetic view of grief does not appear to recognize “closure”, how then might her poems be a comfort, as I stated at the outset?

A. F. Shand, a British psychologist, offers the answer: “[. . .] though it shocks us to recognize it [. . . ] sorrow is lessened or consoled by the perception or the knowledge that others suffer around us or have similarly suffered in the past.”
 
These days we tend to deal with grief by turning to psychologists or counsellors, and by sharing our experiences and feelings with others on internet blogs and social networks. Nineteenth-century mourners had poetry, and discussions of poetry. Through dismissing an array of complex ‘cures’ for grief, Brontë proposes that the most consoling thing to do in times of bereavement is simply to talk and share with others. It is as such that Emily Brontë’s poetry can still inspire a source of solace for 21st century readers.
 

All references to the poems are from The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, ed. C. W. Hatfield (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).

"Brontë tries to locate ports of consolation for those lost in the storm of grief in various ways."

"The suggestion that sorrow is diminished by putting the loss in perspective, for example, by focusing on others having been spared, is thoroughly discounted."

"Through dismissing an array of complex ‘cures’ for grief, Brontë proposes that the most consoling thing to do in times of bereavement is simply to talk and share with others."