Victorian Verse - The Visionary - Emily Bronte (with Charlotte Bronte)

INTRODUCTION TO THE BRONTES

To understand Charlotte and Emily Bronte’s prose and poetry, you need to understand the circumstances of their short, and arguably tragic lives.  The sisters had four siblings – two sisters who died, aged 10 and 12, of consumption (what we now know as tuberculosis, a chronic lung disease which was incurable at the time) while away at boarding school; a brother, Branwell, who eventually died of drink and drugs aged 31, and Anne, who also died of consumption aged 28, shortly after her brother’s death.  Emily died in the same year as Anne, aged 30.  Charlotte, the only one to marry, died in childbirth in 1855, aged 39.  

For much of their short lives they lived in relative isolation high on the Yorkshire Moors in the parsonage of the village of Haworth, where their father was the parson.  The landscape of the Moors infuses their writings.  Their mother died when they were very young and they were brought up by their aunt, who was a strict Methodist.  Their lives were characterised by self-improvement, religiosity and study.  Branwell was educated at home, but the four girls attended school for a time and, for the standards of the day, were well-read.  In childhood, they were left to their own resources for entertainment and amused themselves by chronicling the events of two imaginary countries – Gondal and Angria – writing the stories and poems in tiny, handmade booklets.  The young women hoped to make a living by teaching and were for a time governesses and tutors; Charlotte and Emily lived briefly in France learning French.  However, their dreams of starting their own school in England came to nothing when Mr Bronte’s eyesight began to fail and Branwell sank into despair, drugs and drink following a scandalous affair with the wife of his employer.  Thereafter, they were largely confined to Haworth. There is an overview of Emily’s and her sisters’ lives here.

This poem is often assigned to Emily Bronte alone, although it is believed that Charlotte revised or rewrote the final two stanzas.  Emily is variously described by biographers and critics as “spiritual” and “visionary”, as well as highly imaginative.  This poem clearly refers to a visitation by some kind of spiritual being; whether it is the Christian God, an emissary from Him in the form of an angel, a Presence outside formal religion or about the Creative Process, is harder to determine.  It should perhaps be remembered, also, that although Emily appears to have never had any kind of romantic liaison with a man (or woman), she is the author of Wuthering Heights – a novel centred on one of literature’s most iconic male characters, Heathcliff.  The novel is full of passionate intensity, with a doomed love-affair at its heart.  It might not be too fanciful to suggest that, while not exactly a metaphor for the visit of a lover, there is clear fusing of the spiritual and the physical in its evocation of the intense longing of The Visionary to be united with its Vision. 

Bronte’s poems can be considered largely autobiographical in the sense that hers is the narrative voice – even if the poems are from the Gondal fantasies of her youth.  In this poem, she is essentially The Visionary – there is no real reason to distinguish between the two.

There is a rather good analysis of this poem here and on Emily Bronte here.

The Visionary

The poem is written in iambic hexameters or alexandrines – six beats in a line – and has a regular aabb rhyme scheme.  These long lines and regular rhythm give the poem a tone of quiet surety – a conviction that the longed for Vision will come – whilst allowing Bronte to detail the contrast between indoors and out, and use half-lines to both sustain and vary the tempo and mood.

Silent is the house: all are laid asleep:
One alone looks out o’er the snow-wreaths deep,
Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze
That whirls the wildering drift, and bends the groaning trees.

The first line uses the caesura (the break in the middle of the line) to give two, reinforcing images of the scene indoors, where The Visionary awaits the coming of the Vision.  She draws our view to look out on to the winter scene which, in contrast to the cosy interior, is wild and threatening – she is “dreading” the breeze as it may hinder the approach of the Vision.  “Wildering” is the participle of “to wilder”, which means to lead astray; it is now archaic, although still used in the form of “bewildered”, meaning confused. The scene she describes is the wild Yorkshire moorland that loomed over the parsonage and to which Emily, particularly, was drawn, finding in it both inspiration and solace.  There is a strong feeling of place in most of the Bronte's poems. 

Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor;
Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door;
The little lamp burns straight, its rays shoot strong and far:
I trim it well, to be the wanderer’s guiding-star.

The poet brings us back indoors for further contrast between indoors and out, again using the caesura to give us two, reinforcing, views of the interior.  “Shivering gust” is hyperllage – it is the watcher who would shiver in the cold air.  This time, there is a more assertive tone in the words “Not one”, “straight”, “shoot strong” – nothing can penetrate this haven.  She has slammed the door against the winter cold and against doubt.  The lamp light, which is an oil-lamp as she “trims” the wick, sends out a clear beam which the Vision can use to find the way, just as travellers used to navigate by the stars.

Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame!
Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame:
But neither sire nor dame nor prying serf shall know,
What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.

There is an abrupt shift in tone here (at the point where Charlotte is presumed to have taken over) to an angry rebuttal of the suggestion that what the Visionary is doing is foolish or, at least, not approved by the masters of the house (or her parents?  It seems a little harsh, if so!)  This raises the interesting question of her status in this house – child? servant? adult daughter?  It is not explicit.  Again, she uses the half line to reinforce an idea signalled by the two imperatives – “frown” and “chide” – and the second line to detail their imagined reaction – which is to set their servants to spy on her, or expose her (as a fraud?).  Both the words “slave” and “serf” are archaic (as are “sire” and “dame”) in this context and used for exaggeration, to give added emphasis to her contempt for their censure.  The long third line brings the reader back to a calmer state of mind as she reasserts her unswerving conviction of the Vision’s – “angel” – arrival. 

This stanza also brings the confusion, or merger, of a spiritual visitor with a physical one.  The word “shame” seems a slightly odd charge against someone having a spiritual or religious vision – unless there is a prohibition against it of which the reader is not made aware.  The “angel” (clearly a spiritual reference) “tracks” – leaves footprints – in the snow - a physical rather than spiritual manifestation.  This melding of physical and spiritual continues in the next stanza.

What I love shall come like visitant of air,
Safe in secret power from lurking human snare;
What loves me, no word of mine shall e’er betray,
Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay.

We learn that the visitor is “like” air and has “secret power” that protects it from prying eyes and mere human traps, suggesting that it is spiritual.  But this “thing” also “loves” her – is susceptible to human emotions, and is also a love that must be kept secret, even if keeping true to it costs her life.  This suggests that the longed-for Vision is not unlike the visions of Joan of Arc – an intense spiritual experience which has manifest physical symptoms.

Burn, then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear—
Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air:
He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me;
Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy.

The last stanza reaffirms her faith, as symbolised by the lamp, and heralds the arrival of the “Strange Power” in the form of an angel with “rustling wing”.   She ends with a cry of affirmation – a belief in the power of the Vision and a desire for mutual trust in one another.