‘I would have touched the heavenly key’: Dissonance in Emily Brontë’s Fragments and William Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’

Abstract

This paper explores the dissonance created when Emily Brontë’s striving to find language that equals her ‘world within’ is constrained by the ‘world without’. The title quotation, the opening line of one of Brontë’s early fragments, highlights the intensity of her desire to wake the song that so moved her in the past. It is Emily Brontë’s struggle to wake the ‘entrancing song’ coupled with the pull of the ‘heavenly key’ that impels her poetry. In her treatment of desire to re-enter states of past bliss, Emily Brontë is an heir of Wordsworth. Reading her poems alongside Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, I explore how Wordsworth’s cry of ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam’ is also Brontë’s. Yet, this dissonance is for both poets, to use Emily’s own words, a ‘darling pain’. The longing, even with the pain, is a form of fulfilment. So, I conclude by arguing that this seeming dissonance is what gives Brontë’s poetry its ‘peculiar music’.

keywords:

• Emily Brontë
• influence
• poetry
• Romanticism
• Wordsworth

Notes

Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights’ Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series, ed. by Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), pp. 159–60.

2 Michael O’Neill, ‘“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”’, The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, ed. by Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (Oxford: OUP, 2015), pp. 237–53 (p. 243).

3 All references to Wordsworth’s poetry are taken from 21st Century Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford: OUP, 2010). Line numbers, where appropriate, are given in the text.

4 Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘Wordsworth and the Poetry of Emily Brontë’, Brontë Society Transactions, 16.2 (1972), 85–100, p. 85.

5 Reference taken from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 93. All references to Shelley’s poetry are taken from this edition.

6 Michael O’Neill, ‘“The Tremble from It Is Spreading”: A Reading of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, 139, July (2007), 74–90, p. 79.

7 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound,   II.4.116.

8 Emily Brontë, Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems, ed. by Janet Gezari (London: Penguin, 1992). All references to Emily Brontë’s poems are taken from this edition. Page references are given, parenthetically, in the text.

9 Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford, Gondal’s Queen: A Novel in Verse by Emily Jane Brontë, (Austin: Texas UP, 1955).

10 Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems, p. xxii.

11 I should point out that, while it is perfectly possible that Emily could have read Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations Ode’, she would not have had access to The Prelude, so, in making this connection I suggest affinity rather than influence.

12 Janet Gezari, Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems (Oxford: OUP, 2007), p. 81.

13 Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814 (New Haven: Hale UP, 1964), pp. 17–18.

14 Jerome J. McGann, Don Juan in Context (London: John Murray, 1976), p. 90.

15 All references to Wuthering Heights are taken from Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. by Ian Jack, new edn 2009 (Oxford: OUP, 1976). Page references are given, parenthetically, in the text.

16 21st Century Oxford Authors, p. 73.

17 Reference taken from, John Carey ed., John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, Second Edition, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). p. 413.

18 See Emily Brontë’s poem, ‘The Philosopher’ in Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems, p. 7.

19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, ed. by George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), p. 167.

20 John Keats, Endymion, Book 1: 293–95. Reference taken from John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. by John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 114.

21 Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë: A Biography (Oxford: OUP, 1971), p. 1.

22 Quoted in 21st Century Oxford Authors, p. 764.

23 Gezari, Last Things, p. 6.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Quinnell

James Quinnell has recently graduated with a PhD from the University of Durham. His thesis discusses homesickness and nostalgia in the poetry of Emily Brontë. He works as an English teacher at Farnborough Hill School in Hampshire and is currently writing a book on the Brontës and Gothic.