Outside Sources for Emily Bronte
- 3-5 sentences long
Body of 5 paragraph essay
Body 1: 2 different sources on the poet (can be primary or secondary)
Body 2: 2 different sources on 1 symbol you created to represent 1 part of the poem
Body 3: 2 different sources on 1 symbol you created to represent 1 part of the poem
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Biographical information about the poet
Born in Thorton, Yorkshire, England, on July 30, 1818, Emily Jane Bronte lived a quiet life Yorkshire with her clergyman father;father; brother, Branwell Bronte, and two sisters, Charlotte and Anne. The sisters enjoyed writing poetry and novels, which they published under pseudonyms. As “Ellis Bell,” Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, which garnered wide critical and commercial acclaim.
At home in Haworth, Bronte enjoyed her quiet life. She read extensively and began to make up stories with her siblings. The surviving Bronte children, which included brother Branwell, had strong imaginations. They created tales inspired by toy soldiers given to Branwell by their father.
Emily Bronte was a great writer of the early 19th century. In 1820, the Bronte family moved to the village of Haworth, and unfortunately in 1821 her mother Maria Bronte died. Moreover, two of her sisters Maria Bronte and Elizabet Bronte died of tuberculosis. Emily Bronte then returned home to be cared for by her aunt. Emily was then educated at home.
In truth, their lives and home were strange and often unhappy. Their father was a withdrawn man who dined alone in his own room; their Aunt Branwell, who raised them after the early death of their mother, also dined alone in her room. The two oldest sisters died as children. For three years Emily supposedly spoke only to family members and servants.
Emily was introspective, shy, and strange because of unexciting upbringing on the bleak and desolate moors of Yorkshire. Independent learning and intense pursuit of creative interests without formal schooling or socialization. Typhoid killed her two older sisters Maria and Elizabeth when Emily was six
Emily Bronte is best remembered for her haunting and passionate novel Wuthering Heights, but she has also been recognized as a brilliant poet. Along the three sisters, Emily Bronte’s poetry has been acknowledged as more skillful and moving than that Charlotte or Anne. In the mid 1840s, Charlotte discovered a stash of Emily’s poems and recognized the genius in them.
With her poetry, Bronte focused on descriptions of feeling and mood. Angus Ross, a professor of literature at the University of Sussex wrote that Emily’s poems were by far the best by the Bronte sisters in their 1846 volume of poetry. He added, “Her poems are personal and passionate, even mystical. Her imagination resembles that of Blake in power and freedom.”
That Yorkshire played an important role in Bronte’s life and art is indisputable. Except for several brief absences, she chose to spend her remaining years at the parsonage. However, many of the myths surrounding her life arise from the time immediately after her mother’s death, including the isolation of Haworth, the harsh eccentricities of her father, the dour Methodism of Aunt Branwell, and the abnormal upbringing of the Bronte children.
She is alternately the isolated artist striding the Yorkshire moors, the painfully shy girl-woman unable to leave the confines of her home, the intellect unwilling to deal with normal society, and the ethereal soul too fragile to confront the temporal world.
Analysis of the poem
– From the book (borrowed from NYU)
Imagine death as a final escape. They also imagine death as ‘senseless rest’ or as an eternal exile from identity, which is grounded in the memory of lived experience.
It is a life outside domestic comforts, private yet open and ongoing, and lacking an end or a consummation
The first stanza introduces Bronte’s signature theme of happiness in isolation. She stresses the importance of being alone; it is clear to us that she is most comfortable when left to recede to her altered consciousness.
The entire poem is laying out requisites for the ultimate moment of ecstasy experienced at the end, as the author is finally able to let her self go into the deep relaxation of selflessness. This can be viewed as delving into a creative state, or even a comfortable sleep, where the subject experiences peace and loss of conscious burdens.
The relationship between man and God tinted with lyric variations on the theme of mortality. It talks about the spirit of nature and the spirit of man. It also talks about the borderline between the terms ‘Universe’ and ‘Self’. The present analysis does not strictly limit itself within Emily Bronte’s much-discussed imaginary world of Gondal present it her poetry.
Richard Benvenuto says that “nature releases the soul from its confinement to itself, (…) but as the physical world it presents to the soul only what is material and visible, while the soul yearns for the invisible and the spiritual”. God is source for the spiritual, and although Emily seeks the traditional help of the soul-purging and alleviating Christian faith, she reaches further. On for something strictly personal: a God / Gods of her own – both tangible like Nature and original and extra-mundane like man’s consciousness.
Analysis of symbolism used in literature
We begin with the image of a solitary figure, enchanted by the mysticism of moonlight, drawn into the depths of herself while simultaneously drawn out of the confinement of her body (described as a home of clay; vessel of consciousness.) We get a feeling of peace in her description of such solitude
