A Reading of 'Stanzas' by Emily Brontë

Stanzas

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:

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.

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.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

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.

In this magnificent poem, Emily Brontë meditates on the competing claims of early instinct, imaginative aspiration, material success, and spiritual rapture. We are immediately swept up into its intense drama by one of the most stirring lines in literature: "Often rebuked, yet always back returning." As with "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" or "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree," it enters the mind and there it takes up home, never to leave.

This opening line may echo one of the Biblical proverbs of Solomon: "He, that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy." This is a warning against pride; yet with almost shocking bluntness, Brontë shrugs off this advice, asserting her fierce independence, impatient with any guide save her own implacable will.

As an adult, her journey in life has come full circle. She returns to those "first feelings" that entered into the world with her, and so she passes from experience to a kind of incandescent innocence. When she describes her rejection of "wealth" and book learning for "idle dreams of things which cannot be," is she mimicking those who have sneered at her lack of worldliness? In this phrase, we seem to hear the teacher yelling at her for staring out the window; the priest demanding that she goes back to her Bible lesson; the father fed up with her storytelling.

If Brontë is mocking those authority figures that laughed at her in the past, the "unreal world" must refer back to the dizzy merry-go-round of civilized existence. She's turning the tables on those who have criticized her dreaminess, showing that the so-called real world is the most shadowy of all. Alternatively, she may be resisting the call of the "unreal" imagination, as if she's decided to put down her novel, put on her bonnet, and go outside for a breath of fresh air. Perhaps she is afraid that art, as much as commercial society, could take her away from her first and only love: The brute and restorative force of nature.

In the second and third stanzas, "not" is repeated four times in only eight lines, carrying with it a ritualistic sense of casting away everything that is deemed insubstantial, alien, distracting. She scorns the "traces" of past glory and the "paths of high morality" that may have once tempted her. The faces "distinguished" in the world's eyes from the mob are themselves lapsing into oblivion. In the fourth stanza she moves from negation to affirmation. The repetition of "walk," along with the insistent iambic pentameter of the lines, really evokes her lone, determined trek upwards. This scene is, for me, indelibly linked with the conclusion to Wordsworth's poem "Tintern Abbey," in which he describes his sister's "solitary walk" as the "misty mountain-winds" blow against her. Her figure silhouetted against the moon, with nothing but her "cheerful faith" to lead her on, remains as moving now as it was two centuries ago. It is an icon of human freedom.

Brontë's landscape, with its sheep and "wild wind," is one of humility and violence. Subliminally, we absorb this vision through the poem's rhyme scheme, which alternates between what are traditionally known as feminine and masculine rhymes. The first melt away, the second finish resoundingly: "reTURNing," "ME" "LEARNing" "BE" and so on. Beginning with a feminine rhyme and ending with a masculine one, the poem traces an arc of yin and yang, grace and power.

Turning her back on society, Brontë appears to have chosen obscurity and nothingness. Yet this impression is exploded in the final stanza, where her exile turns out to be nothing less than a transfiguration. On the heights of the moorland, at the point where rock and sky meet, she comes to know herself as the center of creation. It is the outpouring of "feeling" in the hardened human heart, as it beholds the beauty and majesty of nature, which unifies "heaven and hell." Without such ecstasy, Brontë suggests, the universe would collapse into chaos.

Emily Jane Brontë (1818 – 1848) was a British novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel "Wuthering Heights."

Christopher Nield is a poet living in London.