To Imagination
by Emily Bronte

When weary with the long day’s care,
And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
While thou canst speak with such a tone!

So hopeless is the world without;
The world within I doubly prize;
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty.

What matters it, that, all around,
Danger, and guilt, and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom’s bound
We hold a bright, untroubled sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?

As I mentioned in my recap of the Dewey’s readathon, I’d been slacking on my plan to read some Emily Bronte poetry every day.  Like, really slacking, as in, I’d barely read any.  I had skimmed the little volume I picked up and found enough to post one poem here each Friday, but that was about it.  Work has kept me too busy to do as much reading as I wanted to do.  So I used the readathon as a chance to get caught up on my goal, and the above poem in particular struck me, because it just seems like such an honest description of what the world must have been like in Emily Bronte’s head.  The Bronte sisters’ life was rather bleak, it seems, and they escaped their trying circumstances by writing – not just their novels, but their poems and their fantasy stories.  I loved “To Imagination” for this glimpse at a Bronte’s heart.

Some Thoughts on Emily Bronte’s Poetry

In eleventh and twelfth grade, my English classes had a joke about our teacher.  We joked that he was fixated on poems about death.  “If Mr. T gives you a poem to interpret and you don’t know what it’s about,” we advised each other, “just say it’s about death and you’ll definitely get an A.”  (All kidding aside, that advice actually worked for me, at least once, and not even in my regular class.  On the AP English exam, we were set to interpret a poem about blackberry picking.  I had no idea what this poem was supposed to be about, other than blackberry picking, of course.  So I said it was about aging and death, and boom, I got a 5 on the exam.)

Well, I think Bronte could do my English teacher one better.  At least 80% of her poems were about death – probably more, if I wasn’t blazing through them so quickly.  Very few of them weren’t downers in some way.  Even so, I loved Bronte’s wild, dramatic imagery and powerful language.  I could picture her, huddled in the parsonage while the winds whipped the heather around on the north Yorkshire moors, scribbling these lines by steadily diminishing candlelight – crossing out, starting again, maybe showing a piece to Charlotte for criticism.  I let the words work their magic, didn’t worry too much about the poet’s mental state, and wound up very glad I chose to read Bronte this month.  I still prefer Charlotte, but Emily has a newly-won fan.

Recap of National Poetry Month

If you missed my previous posts from National Poetry Month 2014, here they are:

Hark! It’s National Poetry Month
Poetry Friday: Tell Me Tell Me
A Favorite Poem
Peanut’s Picks: Mother Goose
Poetry Friday: Song by Julius Angora
Poetry Friday: When Days of Beauty Deck the Earth

I have one more National Poetry Month post to come, on Wednesday.  (It was originally supposed to post this past Wednesday, but I wanted to talk about BookCon instead.)

If you were celebrating National Poetry Month, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!