Victorian Verse - The Autumn Day its Course has Run - Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte is best known as the author of “Jane Eyre”, the story of an orphaned girl who undergoes a number of trials before she eventually marries the man she loves.  For brief information on her life, go to the Introduction to the Brontes attached to the post on The Visionary.  You can also find further biographical information here and on her poetry and life here.

Most of the poems of the Brontes’ were originally published in 1846 in a collected edition which they privately funded and which sold two copies.  The three sisters published under the pseudonyms Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell – the name of the curate whom Charlotte later married - as it was thought getting published as women would be difficult.

The Autumn Day its Course has Run.

The narrative voice is the poet’s.  It is written in Fourteeners – a line of fourteen syllables, usually in iambs.  It can also be called iambic heptameter.  If the lines are split into two, it becomes alternate tetrameters and trimetres – or ballad rhythm.

A possible reason for not writing the poem as a ballad is that the alternating tetrameters and trimetres force a stop (and often a rhyme) at the end of each line, giving a jaunty, faster pace.  Elongated like this, both aurally and visually, the lines take on a leisurely tone – in fitting with the subject matter.  This is supported by the use of ballad metre in the final two lines, where there is shift in both subject matter and pace.

The Autumn day its course has run. The Autumn evening falls
Already risen the Autumn moon gleams quiet on these walls
And Twilight to my lonely house a silent guest is come
In mask of gloom through every room she passes dusk and dumb
Her veil is spread, her shadow shed o’er stair and chamber void
And now I feel her presence steal even to my lone fireside
Sit silent Nun – sit there and be
Comrade and Confidant to me.

The repetition of “Autumn” in the first two lines sets up a calm, hypnotic tone in keeping with the dying fall of autumn, as does the balance between “evening falls” and “Already risen.”  Note, too, the use of the auditory adjective “quiet” to describe the visual image “gleams” which pulls the scene described into a harmonious whole.  This prepares us for the arrival of the personified “Twilight” – the “silent guest” – who moves through the house bringing darkness with her as if covering it with a cloak.  This is a classical image much used by the Romantics – with whom the Brontes have more in common than with the Victorians.  In classical art, Nyx (Greek) or Nox (Roman,) the goddess of night, is often depicted as surrounded by a dark veil or shroud.  Twilight comes and rests beside the poet, who sits alone by the fire.

 

In the final two lines (which are in iambic tetrametres) the poet addresses Twilight directly, as a “Nun” – a woman “married” to Christ and hence celibate – whom she welcomes as a friend to confide in.  This comparison suggests that Charlotte perhaps feels some kind of affinity with Twilight’s chaste state, and thus can trust her, or that, being removed from the world, as nuns in strict religious orders are, she will listen to Charlotte and advise her without prejudice.

As the poem feels like a fragment (unfinished) it is difficult to say what it is about.  Rather, it is the tone and verse form which perhaps make it effective as the evocation of a mood of quiet contemplation.