Those Brontë Girls, Part 1
For ten years or so I reread one of Dostoevsky’s four major novels each winter, what I came to think of as the winter project. Each novel gave fresh pleasure with each reading, and the project brought a semblance of order to my generally scattershot approach to things. Other winter projects followed, among them Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary, Samuel Beckett, Shelley, Keats.
The Brontës showed up on the radar a few years ago when I came on Emily Brontë’s poem Stanzas in The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, edited by Harold Bloom, and was at once struck, even stunned, by it. I am not generally inclined to think in terms of a single favorite book, poem, author, or film. It is enough to note that “Stanzas” is a poem committed to memory, alongside Emily Dickinson’s “A Certain Slant of Light,” Walt Whitman’s “A Clear Midnight,” and just a few others.
“Stanzas” led to other poems by Emily. (I hope referring to Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne informally will avoid awkwardness and confusion; I do not mean to indicate that I take them any less seriously than male authors, say, Beckett, Shelley, or Keats, whom I tend to refer by last name.) The poems are sufficiently good to make it all but inevitable that sooner or later I would take up Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, which are among too many novels prominent in the tradition that I somehow managed to escape reading during my formative years, when my interests ran more to the likes of The Foundation Trilogy (Isaac Asimov), Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein), Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke), Slan (A.E. Van Vogt), and The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester).
High school English teachers were so happy to have eager readers among their students that they sometimes allowed me to read science fiction for book report assignments when more substantive works would have been in order, however largely wasted on me at the time. I recall slogging through Silas Marner and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and getting little if anything out of either of them. A Tale of Two Cities, junior or senior year in high school, marked the only time in my academic career I resorted to CliffsNotes, borrowed from a pal when I found myself unable to make it beyond the first few pages. Some years later, probably well into my thirties, I picked up A Tale of Two Cities and thoroughly enjoyed it, leaving me to wonder what was the matter with me as a young fellow that I just did not get it.
After returning again to Emily’s poems in the fall of last year, I decided this winter’s project would be the Brontës generally, the major novels Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in particular. “Stanzas” remains to my mind the most striking of Emily’s poems, with its romantic impracticality — “leaving busy chase of wealth and learning / For idle dreams of things which cannot be” — rejection of convention and authority — “I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces / And not in paths of high morality” — and fierce independence — “I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading — / It vexes me to choose another guide.” Where does that nature lead?
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding,
Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside.
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.
What exactly does Brontë mean with the final lines? Even Harold Bloom is flummoxed. “Whatever that centering is, it is purely individual, and as beyond gender as it is beyond creed or ‘high morality.’” (“Introduction,” The Brontës, ed. Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, p. 11)
Firmly rooted in this world that is the world of each of us, she “will seek not the shadowy region,” whose “unsustaining vastness waxes drear.” It is to this world, rendered uncanny, eerie, sublime, that her nature would be leading, this finite existence bounded by death, where waked to feeling we find or make what glory and what grief we may know.
Do I read too much of myself into the poem? Perhaps, tightroping a fine line, for we always bring ourselves to encounters with writers, reading ourselves and our stories into them and theirs, no matter how we try to be open to what may be there independent of our reading.
I do not know if these remarks shed any illumination on why I respond to this poem as I do. Perhaps it can only be said that I simply love it, as we sometimes love those things that we come to call art. It wakes my heart to feeling and carries me away.
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The last two lines of ‘Stanzas’ are strikingly descriptive of the devastation in Haiti. What better manifestation of ‘The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling’ is there than this earthquake? And one needs only peruse any photos of the carnage to witness the very real and centered worlds of Heaven (compassion & aid) and Hell (suffering innocents & price gouging). The poem possesses a timeless quality, thanks for the introduction.