Poetry of the Week: Emily Brontë

The first story that springs to mind when I think of Gothic novels is always Wuthering Heights. The haunting tale of Catherine and Heathcliff, told over generations across the moor. It's far from my favorite, but you could fill a list of classic Victorian Gothic tropes purely with selections from Wuthering Heights.  So it seems only right and proper to devote a week in my Gothic month to selections of Emily Brontë's poetry.


The Night is Darkening Round Me
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go. 


I see around me tombstones grey
I see around me tombstones grey
Stretching their shadow far away
Beneath the turf my footsteps tread
Lie lone and lone the silent dead

Beneath the turf beneath the mould
Forever dark forever cold
And my eyes cannot hold the tears
That memory hoards from vanished years

For time and death and mortal pain
Give wounds that will not heal again
Let me remember half the woe
I've seen and heard and felt below
And heaven itself so pure and blest
Could never give my spirit rest

Sweet land of light thy children fair
Know naught akin to our despair
Nor have they felt nor can they tell
What tenants haunt each mortal cell
What gloomy guests we hold within
Torments and madness tears and sin

Well may they live in ecstasy
Their long eternity of joy
At least we would not bring them down
With us to weep with us to groan

No - Earth would wish no other sphere
To taste her cup of sufferings drear
She turns from heaven a careless eye
And only mourns that we must die

Ah mother what shall comfort thee
In all this boundless misery?
To cheer our eager eyes a while
We see thee smile how fondly smile

But who reads through that tender glow
Thy deep, unutterable woe!
Indeed no dazzling land above
Can cheat thee of thy children's love

We all in life's departing shine
Our last dear longings blend with thine
And struggle still and strive to trace
With clouded gaze thy darling face

We would not leave our native home
For any world beyond the tomb
No rather on thy kindly breast
Let us be laid in lasting rest

Or waken but to share with thee

A mutual immortality


Stanzas
Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

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.