Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
Virginia Woolf wrote of Emily Bronte (referring, of course, to Wuthering Heights): “She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel—a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely ‘I love’ or ‘I hate’, but ‘we, the whole human race’ and ‘you, the eternal powers . . .’ the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in her to say at all.”
Or as G.K. Chesterton put it: “Wuthering Heights might have been written by an eagle.”
And Peace, the lethargy of grief;
And Hope, a phantom of the soul;
And Life, a labour void and brief;
And Death, the despot of the whole!
Emily’s poems are sublime, eternal, bleak—but also warm, lovely, lived-in. Alien and familiar. Human and inhuman. They are reading an epic adventure in a warm bed, the wind howling outside, and on the page, and in your breast. They are inventing an entire fantasy world with your sister and living wild, passionate second lives as Queens of Gondal without ever leaving your childhood home—the circumstance, of course, which gave rise to them. And it is that—the interplay of fantasy and reality, of the human and inhuman, of windswept Yorkshire heath and Augusta Geraldin Almeda, Queen of Gondal, lamenting her fallen lovers, lamenting her fallen world—that birthed the wild passion of Wuthering Heights.
And even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in Memory’s rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?
Oh, to have the prose epics that once accompanied these poems! Emily—why did you deny us them? (And it must have been Emily—I simply cannot believe it of Charlotte, to save so carefully her own Angria prose and destroy Emily’s Gondal!) However it happened, whatever the reason, Gondal, Emily and Anne’s world not for our eyes, survives only in these poems. And yet, fragmentary though this world is, still it lives! One feels, keenly, that the human heart holds endless depths, that every story of another world is also the story of a single soul.
I sat in silent musing,
The soft wind waved my hair:
It told me Heaven was glorious,
And sleeping Earth was fair.
I needed not its breathing
To bring such thoughts to me,
But still it whispered lowly,
“How dark the woods will be!”