CHARLOTTE BRONTË, EMILY BRONTË, EMILY DICKINSON, CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
The Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816–55, a.k.a. Currer Bell and, married, as Charlotte Nicholls), Emily (1818–48, a.k.a. Ellis Bell) and Anne (1820–49, a.k.a. Acton Bell), shared a poetic project. When they were girls Emily and Anne composed the Gondal sagas. Charlotte and her brother, Branwell, composed the Angria sagas, and these fantasies continued to engage them well into their early adulthood. Poems attached to the stories, and the figures of the sagas, with their wild passions, never quite died. The poems are often the fruit of their big gestures, their brimming hearts and earthquake heartbreaks. This does not mean the three women are a composite creature, what R. E. Pritchard calls a Brontësaurus. In their verse, though Emily is by far the best of the three, there are differences of emotional intensity and of prosodic and formal skills.
All three are gothicized Romantics. Their settings are often nocturnal, wintery—the long dark winters of the Yorkshire Moors around Haworth, where they were born and lived through a litany of bereavements (two elder sisters, their mother), and where they received their education and wrote tirelessly and voluminously. The weathers and settings reflect extreme states of mind and emotion, and the forms are somber: balladic and hymn stanzas for the most part. The diction is restricted if not restrained, the range of intense emotions is confined.
Their world was not wide. Charlotte went furthest, becoming a teacher and in 1842 traveling with Emily to Belgium, where both attended a finishing school and Charlotte endured an unhappy romance. They came home in 1843 and three years later, with Anne, published Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, of which two copies were sold in the first year. The names were chosen to neutralize their genders in the public world. The critical and commercial failure of the verse impelled all three young women into fiction.
In 1848 Emily (“stronger than a man, simpler than a child,” according to Charlotte), and their brother, Branwell (a promising artist who fell into dissolute ways), died. In 1849 Anne—as a poet the most rueful and miserable of the sisters—succumbed to tuberculosis in Scarborough. Charlotte lived on, married her father’s curate in 1854, but died nine months later. Three short lives, all of which have become legendary, the parsonage where they lived a place of pilgrimage, their novels among the most popular in the tradition as much on celluloid as on paper.
Most of the poems that were collected in the book were written between 1844 and 1846. Anne’s verse can largely be discounted. It is competent, self-involved and miserable with an exaggerated, self-dramatizing misery. There are exceptions, in particular the anthologized poem “We know where deepest lies the snow.” Charlotte wrote more than half her poetry between her thirteenth and twentieth years. “Once indeed I was very poetical,” she declares, “when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen years old—but I am now twenty-four approaching twenty-five—and the intermediate years are those which begin to rob life of its superfluous colouring.” It is a terrifying commonplace: that poetry is the product of “superfluous colouring” and ceases as the world turns to its natural, adult grays. At fifteen, in “The trumpet hath sounded,” she marries the hymn voices that rise to heaven with images of fairyland: “And, mingling with stern giant forms / Their tiny shapes were seen...” This is a fairyland remote from Spenser’s. It modulates out of the hymn quatrains into curiously tripping eleven-syllable lines. “Mute, mute are the mighty, and chilled is their breath...”
Her mature verse seldom escapes its conventions. Solitary, she begins: “Again I find myself alone”; “What does she dream of, lingering all alone?” She strives, in will and dream if not in action. There is a beloved who does not respond, there is a dream of response, but the dream and the literal will not be reconciled. The poems are restrained in melody, a play of shadows that never solidifies into natural forms. The contingent world, even a fictional version of it, does not emerge as it sometimes seems to do, fitfully, from Anne’s poems.
After the rueful passivity of her sisters’ poems, Emily’s have an emotional vigor of quite another order. They emerge from the sagas of childhood (almost two hundred of Emily’s Gondal poems survive) and relate to the big events and emotions of heroic characters. At nineteen she wrote:
Lord of Elbë, on Elbë hill
The mist is thick and the wind is chill
And the heart of thy Friend from the dawn of day
Has sighed for sorrow that thou went away
More ballad than hymn, the landscape is almost real, but then we meet a gothic forest and a conventionally “desolate sea.” Emily, like her characters, loved liberty and the open spaces of the moors. She insisted on her own patterns of life. Having nursed Branwell through his last illness, she caught cold at the funeral service and began her own two-month decline to death. Yet even on the day she died she insisted on rising in the morning, getting dressed and beginning her daily duties, as if the will could force its dying vehicle to live on. The will is the force her poems celebrate, a will that knows its limitations, as in the poem “I am the only being whose doom”:
First melted off the hope of youth,
Then fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew;
And then experience told me truth
In mortal bosoms never grew.
’Twas grief enough to thank mankind
All hollow, servile, insincere;
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there.
The third line ending, pointing as it does in two possible directions, is masterly; the acid recognition of the first stanza is as harsh as Arnold at his most unforgiving. The best-known and best of her poems are “Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee!,” written for the heroine of the Gondal saga for her dead beloved, and the last lines of verse she wrote:
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me with fear
This poem ends with lines that hover somewhere between the hymns of Isaac Watts and the dense lyricism of Emily Dickinson. It is a faith that comes into clear focus late and in extremity:
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
There is intense life in the verse of Emily Brontë, the kind of life that strains the forms and breaks them into new configurations. As in her fiction, so to a lesser extent in her verse, form is a means and not an end. Her technical versatility is in no way exemplary. Another poet could learn only one valuable lesson from what she does, and that is the ways in which form lives when it is driven urgently by powerful impulses, and how when that urgency ends a poem should stop.
When Emily Dickinson was nineteen she was mired in convention: “Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, / Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!” The uncertain fourteener couplets now gallop, now stumble, to their end-stop. Lines seldom run over, though they have a strong caesura and can be read, taken in pairs, as prototypes for her later quatrains. “Thou art a human solo, a being cold, and lone, / Wilt have no kind companion, thou reap’st what thou hast sown.” From the age of fourteen she was full of optimism for herself. “I am growing handsome very fast indeed!” She expected to become “the belle of Amherst when I reach my seventeenth year.” And at nineteen she was part of a lively community, with dances, charades, dinners, and a Valentine tradition that she honored in prose and verse. Hers was a polite world. To a friend she wrote of Whitman, “I never read his book—but was told that he was disgraceful.”
How was it that out of this conventional and cheerful young woman emerged the reclusive, prolific, miraculous Emily Dickinson, not the belle but—as Mabel Loomis Todd wrote in 1881—“the Myth”? “She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years,” Todd declares, and then evokes the legendary lady dressed all in white:
The Soul selects her own Society—
Then—shuts the Door—
To her divine Majority—
Present no more—
Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems, letters that fill three volumes, as though in writing she invested a life first offered on the altar of convention and then snatched back before the quotidian gods had a chance to make her into another charming American wife and mother.
Five years after Dickinson died, Todd brought out the first volume of her verses, edited and improved by her and Thomas Wentworth Higginson so as to bring them almost within the bounds of convention. Only a handful of the poems had been published (also edited and “improved”) in the poet’s lifetime. It was a lifetime uneventful on the surface, and those events we know have fueled a conflagration of suppositious biography. The original take on her was sentimental: she had fallen in love with a man—a married man, perhaps—(various candidates were proposed) and been rebuffed. Or had she succumbed to agoraphobia? Or had some other emotional trauma affected her? Her poems both dramatize and conceal whatever it was. We were not to know and, in the end, we never will. Adrienne Rich says, “More than any other poet, Emily Dickinson seemed to tell me that the intense inner event, the personal and psychological, was inseparable from the universal; that there was a range for psychological poetry beyond mere self-expression.” We have the legend, but the crucial facts in the recorded life are absent. Dickinson’s reticence seems part of her poetic strategy: if we could assign the poems to specific emotional events, we would ground them. As it is, they are a miracle and a mystery of language.
Born in Amherst in 1830, she was the second child of the lawyer Edward Dickinson and his reticent wife. They were one of the better families. Austin was her elder brother, Lavinia her younger sister. It was apparently a happy home. She was educated at Amherst Academy and then sent to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she distinguished herself unostentatiously. The evangelical movement reached the institution while she was there and claimed some of her contemporaries. Emily withheld herself, even when her family succumbed to the fashionable fervor. (At twenty-four she declined to be a church member, though sometimes she attended for pleasure. It cannot have been easy to go against the will of her father, but she could place no trust in the efficacy of emotional conversion.)
Her father withdrew her from Mount Holyoke after a year in which her religious resistances had already become manifest, and she returned home. Her reclusion began. She became increasingly agoraphobic, and the girl who had visited Boston and Worcester and even, with her congressman father, had spent a couple of months in Washington and Philadelphia, chose to stay at home. To the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to whom she wrote many letters and who never quite took her poems on board, she confessed that she never left home. So reticent was she that, when a doctor was called to her in her last illness, she allowed him to examine her only from a distance as she walked up and down behind a partly open door. She became deeply attached to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her beloved companion. She died of Bright’s disease (nephritis) in 1886 and at last left home.
Her literary favorites she seems to have regarded as an alternative family, hanging their portraits in her room: Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. She admired Emily Brontë’s “No coward soul is mine,” and Higginson read it at her funeral. She read Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Aurora Leigh. Skirting around Whitman, she read the Transcendentalists. She read the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer; she knew the hymns, she loved Webster’s Dictionary, she knew the poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: some of them were family too.
Life, time, nature and eternity are the big counters she moves about the rapid little quatrain squares of her verse, but each counter she makes her own through metaphor and her vivid subversions of expectation. “Her wit is accuracy,” says the poet Alison Brackenbury, but “She is the spider, not the fly.” Not being the fly: perhaps that was her strategy of withdrawal from a world in which she saw women snared in the strict geometries of the social web, and decided that for her the freedom of an elected solitude—not of a spinster only but of a recluse—was preferable, even necessary. So she can write,
My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
There is in her resignation a willed acceptance: not sorrow but something harder and wiser, that takes off from pain into the deeper darkness. The impulse is religious but the consolations, like the abstractions, are not orthodox. Nor is the tone: it is wry, it plays with images, the comedy and cruelty of the bird hopping unobserved along the walk, of the bee in its fuzzy bonnet, or the incongruous sound that breaks in on rapture or grief. Sometimes she is merely charmingly whimsical:
Bee! I’m expecting you!
Was saying Yesterday
To Somebody you know
That you were due—
The Frogs got Home last Week—
She signs the poem as though it were a letter: “Yours, Fly.” On an entirely different scale, she writes in a letter: “You mention Immortality!... That is the Flood subject.” The minute and the boundless have a place in her taut stanzas, where they are interrogated. She is seeking proof and disproof, but can find neither satisfactorily in received religion or in settled materialism. She wants a faith that she can hold, even if only in language, and taste and smell, even if only through the grace of words. An immanence. And she does sense it at times, and then loses it and herself with it. “And God at every gate,” one poem promises:
O Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze—
Permit a child to join.
Thy sacred emblems to partake—
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!
Not First but Last Communion, autumn, the emptiness of winter to follow. If there is a mystical note in her verse, it is rooted insistently in particulars of this world, where His life, His wounds, His love can be inferred. Such mysticism never resolves in an affirming faith. It inheres in what she perceives and cannot be detached. In her white—wedding? Communion?—dress, in her seclusion as absolute as any nun’s in a closed order, we might have expected a more resolute spiritual conclusion to her life of meditation than the reality. She sewed her poems into little books and put them away, one after another, in a box, where after her death her sister found them, nine hundred poems “tied together with twine” in “sixty volumes.” And it’s not an untenable theory that the beloved whom she mourns, departed, may be Christ, the soul’s lover, rather than a particular man—or a particular woman.
She rejected conventional religion, she withdrew from the world, and in 1862 as the pressure of her verse built up in her, she contacted Higginson. Thirty-two, with over three hundred poems already to her credit, she was not conversant with the ways of the literary world. She had responded to Higginson’s “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the Atlantic Monthly. He was well known as a lecturer concerned with women’s rights and women writers. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?... The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask.” Higginson responded, as his critics say, pompously, “without understanding.” It would have been difficult for any American reader in the midst of the Civil War to “understand,” on the strength of a handful of curiously punctuated poems, what lay behind them. In responding he gave her a sufficient initial encouragement, and he continued to correspond. It is easy to patronize a man like Higginson in retrospect for his “lack of vision.” What was remarkable about him was that he did not patronize. He sensed, if not strongly enough, that he was dealing with an authentic spirit. Many an editor would have left Miss Dickinson’s letter unanswered.
His advice was not helpful: she must make the poems more regular, she must punctuate them more conventionally. She did not comply; seeing her poems tidied up upset her: they lost expressiveness and definition. Ironically, his advice made her more resolute in her originality. It is hard to define her originality. I first experienced it when Robert Frost came to my school. In a lecture he called “The Pan-Handle of Poetry” he recited eight lines of verse:
The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The liberty to die.
I was fourteen at the time and had always found her mawkish in textbooks: “I heard a fly buzz when I died” and “I like to see it lap the miles.” After Frost’s recitation in that slow dismissive voice of his, I knew the poem word-perfect and have never forgotten it. But it was not her poem, and it was not word-perfect. This was the version Mabel Loomis Todd published, shaking out the loose straw of the poet’s dashes, taking down her capital letters and, where a word seemed ominously suspended by a definite article, assigning it by a possessive pronoun: “its Inquisitor,” not “the Inquisitor.” “Liberty,” not the paradoxical and troubling “privilege.” What Dickinson needed was a good dose of logic and correctness, à la Higginson. The Todd-Higginson volume of 1890 was a success, and the next year 166 more poems were published, as well as the letters, and further poems edited by Todd in 1896. An edition by Emily’s niece and heir Martha Dickinson Bianchi came out in 1914 under the title The Single Hound, the text based more closely on original manuscripts. In 1929, 1935 and 1945 editions appeared, and finally, in 1955, a collection of all the extant poems, restored by Thomas H. Johnson, with variant readings and fragments, reproducing closely the original punctuation. Dickinson could speak again—or for the first time—in her own voice. The version Frost should have recited (though, an old man, he stuck with the one he had known for years) was this one: different diction, punctuation, rhythm:
The Heart asks Pleasure—first—
And then—Excuse from Pain—
And then—those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering—
And then—to go to sleep—
And then—if it should be
The will of the Inquisitor
The privilege to die—
Here is her originality, unmuffled after eight decades of propriety, an irregularity that answers to the darting, tentative process of the poet’s sight and feeling, the rapid transformations that follow an unfolding argument or feeling. Dickinson’s poetry is the drama of process; “The Heart asks Pleasure” is nothing less than an essential autobiography. And this poem revealing as much of the afterlife as we can be sure of:
I died for Beauty—but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room—
He questioned softly “Why I failed”?
“For Beauty,” I replied—
“And I—for Truth—Themself are One—
We Brethren, are,” He said—
And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—
We talked between the Rooms—
Until the Moss had reached our lips—
And covered up—our names—
What are we to make of “Themself”? Do we change it to “themselves” or “the two” as editors did, or do we acknowledge that this is the very kind of her originality, what drew that meticulous, savagely austere poet of the German language, Paul Celan, to translate her alongside the Russian Osip Mandelstam? The language is not literary. It enacts heard experience. Kinsmen, unexpectedly met, chatting late into the night from their different places: it brings beauty and truth into intimate focus. Strange: These are the same great terms of Keats’s “cold pastoral.”
Enactment at its best occurs in a powerful portrayal of physical dying and its effect on those who keep vigil when death permits the final breath to flow:
The last Night that She lived
It was a Common Night
Except the Dying—this to Us
Made Nature different
We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as ’twere.
As We went out and in
Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame
The Others could exist
While She must finish quite
A Jealousy for Her arose
So nearly infinite—
We waited while She passed—
It was a narrow time—
Too jostled were Our Souls to speak
At length the notice came.
She mentioned, and forgot—
Then lightly as a Reed
Bent to the Water, struggled scarce—
Consented, and was dead—
And We—We placed the Hair—
And drew the Head erect—
And then an awful leisure was
Belief to regulate—
The penultimate stanza must be among the most perfect in her work, corresponding to every element in the experience together and by turns, and the metaphor uncannily apposite. The poem is deliberate in its deployment of capital letters, a kind of formal dress which at the proper time is set aside. In 1886 she too consented, and was dead.
English critics tend to set Christina Rossetti in the frame alongside Emily Dickinson. Dickinson, says C. H. Sisson, “has to be read with, and judged against” Rossetti. He implies a superior “purity” in Rossetti’s language, and no doubt he is right: her diction is refined and largely conventional, her measures more on the Higginson model, and she can be very good. But the two are different in kind even when they touch upon the same themes. The Englishwoman is a poet not of thought or ideas but of emotions, while the American engages with ideas and the feelings they generate and command in the same breath. Religious faith for Christina Rossetti was much more a matter of adjustment than of fundamental struggle. She regarded poetic form as something given and received, to be practiced with skill and originality, but again without fundamental questioning or adjustment. Hers is a measurable and verifiable quality, of a kind unusual at her time. Ford saw her as a harbinger of where poetry would go in coming generations, and he was not wrong: the poems point in the direction that poetry always goes: after radical shakeups, it falls back into familiar channels, with the clarity of reaction and relief.
Beside the poetry of her formidable and sometimes vulgar artist brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, her verse shines brighter than against Dickinson’s. It is indeed at once more precise and firmly conceived, he being (in Ford’s words) a mere “impressionist.” “Occasionally,” he says, “[Dante Gabriel] displayed a sense of words. Look at these for the loss of the White Ship in the ballad of the same name: ‘And the ship was gone; / And the deep shuddered; and the moon shone.’ ” His admirers are overwhelmed; they “insist that he write four hundred lines more of bilge, never blotting a line. None of them ever blotted a line.” And while this adulation occurred, “all the while, up in the fireless top back bedroom on the corner of the cracked wash-stand, on the backs of old letters Christina Rossetti sat writing.” For Ford only Browning and Christina Rossetti in their period were worth rereading.
It is the simple directness of Christina Rossetti’s language that draws poets of a later generation, like Elizabeth Jennings. She admires, and learns from, what C. H. Sisson calls “the intimate falls of her rhythms.” Rossetti is available to any reader: subtle in form and those thoughts that take the shape of feelings, direct in emotional charge.
She was born “with a pen in her hand” in London in 1830. She started composing early, her first story when she was too young to write. Her first poem she dictated to her mother: “Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.” Her early mature poems (a few in Italian) have some of the merits of her best work, and she continued writing almost to the end. If her life is not full of the biographical interest of the major Pre-Raphaelites, it was marked by deep human commitments, friendships, two intense but not turbulent or successful courtships (“My heart is breaking for a little love”), fears and regrets. It was also fueled by a faith that felt wonder, doubt and moments of intense penetration of religious mystery, of a kind not common among her contemporaries. The religion of the later poems has not the flashes of the earlier—like Wordsworth, she lost something as time closed in on her. She becomes doctrinaire, catechistic. The large body of her poems is narrow in range, but there are moments of mastery. Her very quietness is a source of strength. She is the Gwen John to Dante Gabriel’s Augustus, the one we turn to when the artful and the artificial weary us and we seek a true voice of feeling. She died after a severe and disfiguring illness in 1894. In the weeks before her death she disturbed the neighbors each night with her unaccountable screaming.
The first book appeared in 1862, Goblin Market and Other Poems, including the eponymous poem, the first by a Pre-Raphaelite to gain attention. It has, in the words of the poet-editor and anthologist David Wright, “a vitality and sensuousness allied to simplicity, clearness and intellectual coherence, in notable contrast to the lushness of most of the poetry of the period.” The poem has been regarded, despite its intense sexuality, as proper for children. Several books followed, with love poems and religious verse for adults, for children poems bordering on nonsense, beautiful without the humor of Lear or Carroll. She was interested (a sign of her professionalism) in “my dear Copyright.” She knew what it meant materially to be a professional writer of essays, religious meditations and poems.
The poems that have become embedded deep in the tradition are “In the bleak midwinter,” the unbearably plangent “When I am dead, my dearest,” the almost cloying “My heart is like a singing bird,” and “Remember me when I am gone away.” For C. H. Sisson one poem, “Memory,” essentializes her, and indeed her handling of form is so quietly tactful, her diction so plain and preponderantly monosyllabic, the contingent facts so quietly cleared away, that it stands (despite its conventional look) unique in its century for unexaggerated candor:
I nursed it in my bosom while it lived,
I hid it in my heart when it was dead.
In joy I sat alone; even so I grieved
Alone, and nothing said.
I shut the door to face the naked truth,
I stood alone—I faced the truth alone,
Stripped bare of self-regard or forms or ruth
Till first and last are shown.
I took the perfect balances and weighed;
No shaking of my hand disturbed the poise;
Weighed, found it wanting: not a word I said,
But silent made my choice.
None knew the choice I made; I make it still.
None knew the choice I made and broke my heart,
Breaking mine idol: I have braced my will
Once, chosen for once my part.
I broke it at a blow, I laid it cold,
Crushed in my deep heart where it used to live.
My heart dies inch by inch, the time grows old,
Grows old in which I grieve.
Her mind, as Sisson says, is resolute: she knows what she is doing, the pain she causes and its consequence: yet she acts.
Her brother, Dante Gabriel (1828–82), has been eclipsed even as her star has risen. Only his most famous poems, “The Woodspurge” and “The Blessed Damozel,” are tenuously held in popular memory. The whole Pre-Raphaelite thing, at the hub of which he stands, with its attitudinizing, its excesses, its wild and sometimes lunatic palette, is less popular in literature than in the galleries. His poems do not partake of the charged excess of the paintings. In form and diction they are more chaste (whatever their occasions may have been); they are not dated except in their hankering after allegory, a trace of medievalism that does not mar the diction, though it provides us with personifications of a curiously varnished type. Formally, in sonnets and narratives and inventive lyrics, he is a master—of enjambement, of cunning irregularity in prosody—who approaches “voice” with a diction remarkably unliterary and uncluttered for a man of his coterie. Ford is excessively unkind to him, though for Ford perhaps his sin was to have cast so long a shadow on his sister, who now glows with such a steady light of her own.