Gradesaver has published a number of guides on the individual poems of Emily Brontë, including Remembrance, Hope, No Coward Soul Is Mine, Long Neglect Has Worn Away, and A Day Dream.
While Brontë's career was too brief to be divided into major periods, her work covered a diverse array of subject matters while featuring an expressive and authoritative style. She often used striking natural imagery to convey her ideas and concepts in a more immediately accessible manner. In the opening of the poem "Remembrance," the speaker mourns her dead lover: "Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee, / Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! / Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, / Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave?" By using the haunting image of her beloved's snow-covered grave, the speaker places us immediately in her circumstances, giving a tangible sense of what she is experiencing. The use of winter imagery quietly conveys the speaker's feelings of long-held grief. This passage also highlights another key aspect of Brontë's writing: emotional force. "Remembrance" is a poem about a speaker who has lost her beloved many years ago and is struggling to hold onto his memory. Uncertain of what to do, she finds that she remembers less and less of him each day and worries she is being disloyal to his memory, even as she begins to heal. She wonders if she can move on and find meaning in her present life, without her lover, or if she is condemned to only be happy in her memories. Brontë subtly weaves all of this complexity into the poem, grounding the reader in the scene and suggesting the struggles within the speaker's interiority. Her poems often cut right to the core of a painful conflict, focusing on protagonists who signal their feelings with emphasis and intensity.
This reflectiveness is also apparent elsewhere in her work, as she often paired abstract ideas with fully realized representations. In "Hope," the speaker envisions the emotion of hope as "a timid friend" and harshly rebukes the mistreatment she receives from "her." In the middle of the poem, she characterizes her relationship with Hope as essentially imbalanced: "Like a false guard, false watch keeping, / Still, in strife, she whispered peace; / She would sing while I was weeping; / If I listened, she would cease." She shows Hope's "false watch keeping" in several instances of failed connection. Hope faintly whispers "peace," too softly to be meaningful. She sings while the speaker is "weeping," but stops when the speaker "listened." All of the speaker's efforts at interaction are blocked or denied. In this way, Brontë manages to literalize an otherwise intangible image of hope. By creating a real emotional dynamic between the speaker and Hope, Brontë is freed up to create an understanding of the feeling of being unable to rely on the feeling of hope. This thread of emotional access as well as the use of personified concepts feature prominently throughout her work. This use of grounded comparison gives the reader a more direct route into the thematic material of her poetry. While poems like "Hope" explore complex ideas, they almost always rely on the foundation of a poignant or affecting scene. In Brontë's work, sentiment and thought are never far apart.
Another major aspect of Brontë's poetry is an interest in the passage of time. In the poem "A Day Dream," she places the spotlight on a speaker who cannot enjoy a beautiful summer day because she is too preoccupied with the fact that all of summer's beauty will eventually fade away. In a moment of self-reflection, the speaker notes "We thought, 'When winter comes again, / Where will these bright things be? / All vanished, like a vision vain, / An unreal mockery!'" She decries the fact that once "winter comes again," all of "these bright things" will vanish. Her focus on the future robs her of the ability to experience beauty in the present. The inevitable fact of summer's end forces her to reckon with the decay of this summer display. This interest in time and how it elapses imperceptibly and ineluctably is another important thread in Brontë's work; it also crops up in her poem "Long Neglect Has Worn Away." The poem depicts a woman who has lost both her physical beauty and emotional wellbeing. The opening stanza attributes both of these things to a combination of time and neglect: "Long neglect has worn away / Half the sweet enchanting smile; / Time has turned the bloom to gray; / Mold and damp the face defile." Brontë isn't simply interested in unsettling physical descriptions of the woman's eroded beauty; she sets up these contrasting images to reveal what has been taken from this woman. Time functions as an agent of decay, triggering the slow ruin of her happiness. This focus on the divide between a formerly positive state and a currently negative one is a common feature in Brontë's poetry, recurring in everything from the conclusion of seasons to the mourning of a loved one. These scenes reveal the fragility of joy, portraying it as easily swept away by the passing years. Directly connected with her interest in mortality, Brontë's depiction of time zooms in on its capacity to permanently alter lives, leaving her protagonists to sift through the fragments of their past.
She was often concerned with the way that the human world was linked to the more primordial forces of nature. This was a theme that would recur throughout her novel Wuthering Heights, but also appears prominently in her poetry. In "The night is darkening round me," Brontë offers an eerie vision of a stormy night in the forest: "The giant trees are bending / Their bare boughs weighed with snow; / The storm is fast descending, / And yet I cannot go." Like her personification of ideas and feelings, Brontë's powerful and dramatic images of nature serve to give the reader a more tangible hold on what she tries to express in her writing. In this case, the unsettling image of a storm is framed in the context of menacing forest scenery. Instead of writing about her feelings of fear, the speaker chooses to externalize her feelings onto the woods that surround her. This use of setting often works to amplify the character's emotions in Brontë's poems, providing a clear representation of their mood.
In "No Coward Soul is Mine," one of Brontë's most widely discussed works, she makes a powerful declaration of her faith, suggesting a linkage between herself and an unseen, but ever-present, divine force. The opening asserts this linkage right away: "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 from Fear." She is making a claim about the bravery of her own soul while acknowledging the magnitude of the divinity in whom she places her faith. The forcefulness of her tone here underscores the active quality of her faith. Her belief is rooted in strength, not fear. She is completely free of doubt, as she feels certain about the all-powerful nature of her God. In many of Brontë's poems, she explores the complexity of the idea of divinity and an all-encompassing presence. She suggests that these forces make themselves visible in every aspect of creation, but are inconceivable in their totality. Brontë crafts a vision of religion and God that is remarkable in its sustained intensity and steadfast devotion. Many critics have speculated that if Wuthering Heights had not become her main focus and her health had not declined so steeply, Brontë may have honed in on poems in this religious vein.
Stylistically, Brontë's work is fairly consistent. She almost always uses quatrains and an ABAB rhyme scheme. These two devices neatly divide each four-line unit in her poems into a distinct, cogent thought. This structure is readily apparent throughout her work, for example in this excerpt from "Remembrance": "Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers, / From those brown hills, have melted into spring: / Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers / After such years of change and suffering!" The rhyme creates a subtle link between the images and ideas in the stanza, while the fourth line ends definitively with an exclamation. While Brontë's career was tragically brief, she reached stylistic maturity at a very young age, finding a voice that adequately captured the sweeping natural vision and passionate emotional intensity of her artistic vision.
