Victorian Verse - Stanzas - Emily/Charlotte Bronte

This poem seems to be usually attributed to Emily Bronte rather than Charlotte, but may be a collaboration or revision.  There are clear similarities with The Visionary and with I Now Had Only to Retrace.  A brief overview of the arguments for and against can be found here, along with an analysis of the poem - which is perhaps a little more enthusiastic than it warrants. 

Here is a summary of what is happening in each stanza.  It is clearly autobiographical, in that it deals with the supremacy of nature and the power of her relationship to it, which suggests the Emily of “Wuthering Heights”.  The meaning is somewhat ambiguous: in common with other poems by both Charlotte and Emily, there is a syntactical and lexical compactness, or shorthand, which tends to make the train of the argument torturous at times.  Often, interpretation relies on a single punctuation mark and as many of these poems have been reconstructed from scraps of manuscript, there is no hard and fast guarantee that any one interpretation is correct.  Learn to live with ambiguity. 

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:

The opening lines are a rejection of those that have advised her to “keep it real” – focus on the real world of work and education instead of the imaginary world (“idle dreams” as her detractors describe them) that she indulged in as a child – writing her stories, with her siblings, about Gondal and Angria.  She comes back to them as being true to her nature, her “first feelings”.

However, the stanza ends with a colon, which suggests that a new idea is going to be introduced.  Although she usually ignores her detractors, and is happy to return to the world of the imagination, “Today” she is going to reject that world (the “shadowy region”) as well. 

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.

The illusory life that she created in her stories is not enough for her today – and has its own dullness of repetition, as conveyed by the bleakness of the “unsustaining vastness” – a desert – “drear“ meaning desolate, empty, and the repeated “legion after legion” – undistinguished masses.  Conjuring up these visions, to her surprise (“strangely”), causes her to feel the same way about the world of the imagination as it does the world of “wealth and learning” – which, until today, she has been happy to view as less real (“unreal”) than her imaginary one.  Today, as the commentator says, she is going “back to nature” by going out for a walk – leaving all “worlds” behind.  Her determination is evident form the abrupt “I’ll walk”.

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.

The path she is going to take will not be one taken in her imaginary worlds, populated with knights and ladies, kings and queens who live lives of noble endeavour.  She is going back to her “roots.”

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.

The poet evokes the countryside that has sustained her all her life; she has no need for a guide to understand it.  The alliteration emphasises her passion for the simple, natural world and her feeling that she is at one with the sheep on the hills and the wind blowing across it.

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.

The rhetorical question anticipates the cynicism of the “real world” of “wealth and learning” about the value of nature to teach.  Her robust response (in the emphatic repetition of “more”) is that it can teach us everything about triumph and failure – “glory and …grief”.  If your heart is receptive, the power of nature can make sense of the whole world and everything within it.