The dead crab summary and analysis

The Dead Crab

A rosy shield upon its back,

That not the hardest storm could crack,

From whose sharp edge projected out

Ban pin-point eyes staring about;

Beneath, the well-knit cote-armure

That gave to its weak belly power;

The clustered legs with plated joints

That ended in stiletto points;

The clas like mouths it held outside:-

I cannot think this creature died

By storm or fish or sea-fowl harmed

Walking the sea so heavily armed;

Or does it make for death to be

Oneself a living armoury?

The poem The Dead Crab by Andrew Young is a short and seemingly simple piece of work. However, its length and subject matter do not diminish the poem’s rich stylistic qualities.

In a general outline of the poem, it is a sonnet with an AABBCCDDEEFFGG rhyme scheme. From the first reading the reader can already discern the textual patterning of the poem. It is divided into two parts, which deviates from the conventional sonnet of 3 stanzas with four lines each and an ending couplet. The first part starts from line 1 to line 9, while the second part from line 10 to line 14. The first part is the persona’s physical description of the crab, but the second is his reflection of the subject. The Dead Crab also makes use of poetic license to make syntactic manipulation through the use of inversion, parallelism and principle of end-focus, as discussed later on.

The first part leaves little room for literary interpretation as it is a rather unambiguous description of the crab’s anatomy. However, stylistically, the persona leaves much room for analysis through his interesting choice of words and punctuation.

The first line alone is already foregrounded. The phrase rosy shield is prominent because these words do not belong in the same lexical set. The word rosy has feminine and gentle connotations, whereas shield is normally associated with the image of a strong object that protects one from danger. These two words matched together give quite a misleading idea of the crab; one may say it lulls the reader into having a certain presupposition or conjecture of how the poem would turn out as one reads on.

As one goes along, however, the innocuous image of the crab is dispelled through the use of words and adjectives that are more in contrast. Lines 1 and 2, when combined, give the impression of the crab shell’s durability, which the poet likens to a shield, a metal object that is almost indestructible by most elements. The persona puts further emphasis on the strength and hardness of the crab’s shell in Line 2 by saying that the shield of a crab shell is so tough that not even the hardest storm can crack it. The hardest storm, one might safely assume, would be able to destroy many things in its path, but here the poet asserts that it would not even crack the shell.

The crab’s physical description takes on a more menacing image from Lines 3 to 8. Words like sharp edge projected out, black pin-point eyes, cote-armure, power, plated joints and stiletto points may come very well under the semantic field of a soldier’s uniform. The reference to shield, cote armour, plated joints and stiletto points makes it rather evident that the persona likens the crab as being dressed for war like a soldier; indeed, he returns to that idea in the second half of the poem in Line 12, referring to the crab as “heavily armed.” The comparison reveals the extent of the creature’s power, danger and connotes a sense of invincibility.

However, there is an unusual prominence in Line 5, where the cote-armure is described as “well-knit.” Again, the occurrence of two lexically incompatible words happens; a semantic violation. The former is associated with soldiers and war, while the latter is associated with knitting and needlework. The persona refers to the physical characteristics of a crab’s underbelly that resembles a knitted item. Perhaps he is also referring to the image of a well-threaded, chain-linked yarn, crafted so that unravelling it would be almost impossible. Then, well-knit cote-armure would suggest that not only is the crab shell of unusual strength, but also of intricate craftsmanship by nature. The poet also employs an almost similar stylistic technique in Line 9, using a simile to liken the claws to mouths to note its physical resemblance.

What is interesting to observe is how the poet slickly cohere the words well-knit and stiletto. There are two denotations of the word “stiletto”. One is a noun that refers to a type of dagger with a blade that is thick in proportion to its width; this coheres with the lexical set of a soldier. The other is a verb that refers to action of a pointed instrument for making eyelet holes in needlework; this coheres with the adjective well-knit. The word stiletto here creatively functions as a lexical cohesion for two lexical sets used in the crab’s description by the persona. While before well-knit was foregrounded for being a semantic violation, stiletto now helps it to achieve lexical cohesion.

The first part of the poem produces three instances of linguistic exploitation. Line 2 has a syntactic manipulation through the inversion of the word not. It should be written as That the hardest storm could not crack. The poet’s inversion makes it clear that he uses linguistic exploitation for the purpose of stress, as his manipulation does make the line sound more emphatic. Line 6 shows another syntactic violation through the inversion of the word power. Syntactically, the line should be written as That gave power to its weak belly. However, the inversion makes the word power the emphasis of that line, employing the principle of end-focus. Line 9 is curiously missing two commas; the conventional syntactic structure would be The claws, like mouths, it held outside. Perhaps this is an exercise of poetic license?

In the second part of the poem, the tone changes. The use of I indicates the change from a tone of detached to personal, as well as the showing the poem’s segmentation from description to reflection. The poet uses syntactic manipulation for rhyming and emphasis reasons, in line 11 where grammatically it should be Harmed by storm or fish or sea-fowl. Again, he applies the principle of end-focus to this line. The inversion from front to the end of the line effectively shows the stress, especially when coupled with a corresponding rhyme in the next line. There is also a use of syntactic parallelism through the lexical repetition of the word or in Lines 11 and 13.

The persona has an interesting reflection in the poem’s second half. He affirms that the crab cannot have died in the hands of nature. It was not killed by a bird or fish or a storm, because of its powerful and deadly natural “armour.” The ending couplet is the most ambiguous of the poem, particularly due to the lexical contrasts in Line 13 and 14, which are death and living respectively. One interpretation of that is based on the irony of what protects you can also kill you. The persona is wondering if for all the protection the crab’s armour have provided, could it be that it is that very armour that killed it? Even he does not really know the answer, as he ends the couplet with a question mark.

The poem is highly cohesive in idea, form and sound. The cohesion in idea slightly intersects with the prior observation on textual patterning, where the overall presentational sequencing of the poem begins with the crab’s description, then tying in with the persona’s reflection of the crab at the end. The sequencing within the first part of the poem begins by describing the crab’s back, before moving on to its eyes and going below to its belly and limbs, where the legs are described first and the finally, the claws. Sequence in the poem’s second part is also very orderly. The persona eliminates the possible causes of the crab’s death methodically before ending with his own conclusion. Suffice to say that cohesion in idea is done in a very sensible order.

The form cohesion is found in rhyme. Despite the irregular segmentation of the poem – the first part of the poem ends at Line 9, the only unpaired line (in the first part of the poem) – the poet achieves unity in rhyme for Line 10 to cohere the two lines as well as making the shift from the persona’s description to reflection less detached as these two lines are paired in rhyme. The punctuation also helps in form cohesion. The separation of content is clear through the use of commas (to join Lines 1 & 2 together), semicolons (to cohere Lines 3 & 4; 5 & 6; 7 & 8; 10, 11 & 12; 13 & 14) and the question mark at the ending couplet. In Line 9 the punctuation is different from the others as it has a colon and a dash. This punctuation serves to make the transition of the two parts of the poem smoother, as it indicates that after the description of the crab, there is something else more important the persona wants to say.

Cohesion is not only achieved in idea and form, but also sound. The end syllables of each line are hard sounds phonetically (back & crack, out & about, armure & power, joints & points, outside & died, harmed & armed). The poet cleverly infuses cohesion not just between sound alone, but also coheres the lexical idea of the hardness and power of the crab by employing the phonetic equivalent through the choice of words with hard phonetic sounds. There are many instances of the use of plosive consonants at the end syllable of each line (back – crack, out – about, outside – died, harmed – armed), as well as fricative consonants (joints – points). While Lines 5 & 6 has a comparatively weak phonetic sound in comparison (armure – power), they instead become foregrounded in the midst of hard-sounding rhymes and that only serves to enhance the meaning of those lines. There is also another exception in the ending couplet (be & armoury) because they have a vowel end each. This causes the couplet to be foregrounded in speech because the poet intends to put emphasis on his reflection – after all, the whole raison d’être of the poem lies in the ending couplet.

The Dead Crab looks deceptively simple; it would not take much to understand the poem through literary analysis. However, one can only truly appreciate the ingenuity of the poem through thorough stylistic analysis.

تعليق

What would you compare the crab to…..for example a turtle or a bulldozer..??

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composed upon Westminster bridge

Wordsworth's Poetical Works Summary and Analysis

In lines 1 through 8, which together compose a single sentence, the speaker describes what he sees as he stands on Westminster Bridge looking out at the city. He begins by saying that there is nothing "more fair" on Earth than the sight he sees, and that anyone who could pass the spot without stopping to look has a "dull" soul. The poem takes place in the "beauty of the morning," which lies like a blanket over the silent city. He then lists what he sees in the city and mentions that the city seems to have no pollution and lies "Open unto the fields, and to the sky."

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

In lines 9 through 14, the speaker tells the reader that the sun has never shone more beautifully, even on nature ("valley , rock, or hill"), and that he has never seen or felt such deep calm. He goes on to describe the way that the river (which he personifies) glides along at the slow pace it chooses. The poem ends with an exclamation, saying that "the houses seem asleep" and the heart of the city is still.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Analysis

"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" is an Italian sonnet, written in iambic pentameter with ten syllables per line. The rhyme scheme of the poem is abbaabbacdcdcd. The poem was actually written about an experience that took place on July 31, 1802 during a trip to France with Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy Wordsworth.

The poem begins with a rather shocking statement, especially for a Romantic poet: "Earth has not anything to show more fair." This statement is surprising because Wordsworth is not speaking of nature, but of the city. He goes on to list the beautiful man-made entities therein, such as "Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples." In fact, nature's influence isn't described until the 7th line, when the speaker relates that the city is "open to the fields, and to the sky." While the city itself may not be a part of nature, it is certainly not in conflict with nature. This becomes even more clear in the next line, when the reader learns that the air is "smokeless" (free from pollution).

Wordsworth continues to surprise his reader by saying that the sun has never shone more beautifully, even on natural things. He then personifies the scene, giving life to the sun, the river, the houses, and finally to the whole city, which has a symbolic heart. The reader imagines that the city's heart beats rapidly during the day, while everything and everyone in it is bustling about, but now, in the early morning hours, the city's heart is "lying still." By using personification in his poem, Wordsworth brings a kind of spirit to the city, which is usually seen as a simple construction of rock and metal.

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Poetry analysis: Upon Westminster Bridge, by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth's sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 falls into the category of Momentary Poems. The poet is describing what he sees, thinks and feels on a specific day at a specific moment. Had September 3, 1802, been a dismal day of rain, fog or overcast skies, we would not have this lyric to enjoy. Fair weather is often an inspirational awakening to the muse of poetry. For another example of momentary poems, note the specific temporal and seasonal references in this lyric of Robert Browning with its memorable final lines.
The year's at the spring
And the day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven
All's right with the world!
Though the fact has little bearing on the poem, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had traveled to London to take a ship to France, where Wordsworth mistress Annette Vallon was living with the ten-year-old Caroline, whom Wordsworth had sired but had never seen. The coach taking him and his sister to the seaside dock paused on the Westminster Bridge that crosses the Thames. Looking back in the brilliant morning sunlight at the sleeping city of London, the poet composed his Petrarchan sonnet in a tone peaceful and serene.
He presents a panorama of London, commencing with two metrically irregular lines of 5 accents. I will convey my scansion by placing the stressed syllables in capitals.
EARTH HAS not ANYthing to SHOW more FAIR:
DULL would he BE of SOUL who could PASS BY
(And then lines of regular iambic pentameter:)
A SIGHT so TOUCHing IN its MASterY;
This CITy NOW doth, LIKE a GARment, WEAR
The BEAUty OF the MORning: SIlent, BARE,
The spondaic substitution or successive accented syllables lends emphasis to the emotional feeling that strikes the poet. Here is a romantic who spends most of his time in the Lake Country, in fields of daffodils, exulting in an urban morning cityscape, unconcerned with the getting and spending, buying and lending that he decries elsewhere.
The second quatrain generalizes about the skyline shapes without detailing them. (And I shall abandon my scansion so as not to insult the reader's intelligence and sense.) The poet has personified London through his use of the simile "like a garment" and the verb "wear." The catalogue of manmade structures includes "Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples." Paradox intrudes as the garment worn by the city is bright and glittering sunshine that does not conceal, clothe, or protect but emphasizes bare beauty.
The next personifications are of the sun and the river. The verb "steep" in the opening of the sestet can support a variety of definitions including cleansing, softening, bleaching, bathing, imbuing. The personified morning sun performs these actions on "valley, rock, or hill."
The magic performed by the sun on the City, while the Thames "glideth at his own sweet will," induces in the poet a feeling of calm, as though the personified houses were peacefully asleep, and the mighty, throbbing heart of the metropolis is wrapped in stillness.
"Dull would [they] be of soul" who do not feel the power and excitement of this lyric.

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William Wordsworth was great English poet who gave English literature a new direction. He began a romantic era in English literature. He wrote "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" in 1802 and it was published in 1807. It is fourteen lines sonnet. This poem is about the city of London. It is said that he wrote this poem after getting inspired by the morning view of city of London when he was going to France and in his way he passed the Westminster Bridge. It was the morning time and the view from the bridge somehow impressed him.
The poem begins with the description of beautiful scene of London which poet sees from the Westminster Bridge during his morning walk. In the first two lines of the poem he declares that for him the look of the London city is most beautiful on the earth and one who ignores it or passes without admiring it, must be a human with dull soul.
"A sight so........smokeless air", in the next six lines he describes the beauty of London. He cites London as an emperor. In the morning time fog has covered the city like it is wearing a garment. There is no pollution in the air and the buildings like towers, domes, theatres, temples, etc, and ships floating in the Thames River are shining with the rays of rising sun.
In the next six lines he describes the natural beauty of the London city. "Never did Sun.....deep", in this line he says that he never saw such bright and beautiful Sunrise and grandeur look of Sun. The valleys, rocks and hills are glowing with its golden rays and this sight is very soothing and made him very calm.
"The river glideth.....lying still!", he further says about the beauty of Thames River. The flow of a river is a natural thing. Wordsworth had great love and respect towards the nature and he always considered natural things as any other living thing. In this poem he personifies the Thames River and tells that it flows according to its sweet free will. He also personifies the houses as he tells that during the peaceful morning every house seems in a sleepy mood. He also sees the London as a living thing as he cites the London as an emperor and center of city as its heart, which is lying still in the morning time.
Wordsworth presents a very positive picture of London unlike to his contemporary poet William Blake who portrayed a very negative and sadistic picture in his poem "London".

What is the theme and subject of the poetry 'composed upon westminster bridge'?

In this poem, Wordsworth captures and celebrates the calm early morning view from his vantage point of Westminster Bridge in 1802. One should note his trademark simple language, reflecting simply his own personal thoughts on the scene, and the rhyme scheme (abba abba cdcdcd) in this sonnet. This scheme divides the first eight lines (octave) and the next six (sestet) . In the first eight, he describes early morning London in detail, and then goes on in the final six to compare the city in that moment to natural wonders. It is significant that he feels that this sight is more beautiful than any purely natural one as he was a great nature lover and lived in the countryside. The compact description of London in lines six and seven emphasise the compactness of the city, and long vowel sounds such as "glideth" and "silent" emphasise the calm feeling of the occasion.

This is an interesting addition to Romantic poetry, since most works of that time expressed the beauty of nature, while "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" praises the coexistence between nature and civilization. Interestingly the tone and ideas present are in direct contrast to the poem, "London", by William Blake - another text of the era, detailing the suffering present within a cold, uncaring London; William Blake being another poet associated with the Romantic movement

I copied the above from the link provided. It is a beautiful poem but unfortunately, were you to stand upon Westminster Bridge today you would get a very different and much degraded view for your trouble. Not that London isn't a wonderful city - it is - but the fields of 1802 when this poem was written have long since been built upon. So much for the coexistance between nature and civilization. Sad, isn't it? I have to disagree with the writer's contention that lines 6 and 7 emphasise the compactness of the city though. The two lines simply make a statement about the city and possibly its skyline.

I would suggest you read this lovely, serene poem again. Read the analyses that you receive or that your own internet researches (via google) reveal. Then write your own analysis. I'm sure you'll do a fine job of it. Best of luck.

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the mild mist upon the hill Critical essay and summary

POET

Emily Jane Brontë (1818 - 1848)

Emily Jane Bronte

BIOGRAPHY

The only poems by Emily Brontë that were published in her lifetime were included in a slim volume by Brontë and her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), which sold a mere two copies and received only three unsigned reviews in the months following its publication. The three notices were positive, however, especially with respect to the contributions of Ellis Bell—Emily Brontë. The writer of the review in the 4 July 1846 Athenaeum, for example, noted her "fine quaint spirit" and asserted that she had "things to speak that men will be glad to hear,—and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted." It seemed in 1848, the year of Emily's death, as if this potential were never to be realized. However, Brontë's twenty-one contributions to Poems represented only a fraction of the nearly two hundred poems collected by C. W. Hatfield in his noteworthy edition, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (1941). Several factors combined to delay the publication of a complete, accurately edited collection of Brontë's poems: her sister Charlotte, who in her heavy-handed revision of seventeen unpublished poems by Brontë to accompany the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, went so far as to add lines and whole stanzas; the wide dispersal of Brontë's manuscripts after their sale in 1895 by Charlotte's widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls; and finally the difficulty in reading the manuscripts, some of which Brontë wrote in a tiny, crabbed script on irregular bits of paper. Ranging from 1836 to 1846—fortunately, Brontë dated all but about a dozen of her poems—these verses reveal that she had indeed reached the heights attempted in the poems in the 1846 volume.

Unfortunately the student of Brontë's biography cannot rely on the signposts she left on her manuscripts and must try to reconstruct her life from a scarcity of material. The plays and stories she wrote with her sister Anne about the imaginary land of Gondal have not survived. Her other prose consists of seven essays in French, a few notes, and four birthday letters she exchanged with Anne. Much of what we know about Brontë is seen at a remove, through Charlotte's writings about her or Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte. Myths about the family abound, but Brontë seems to be the most mysterious figure of all of them. She is alternately the isolated artist striding the Yorkshire moors, the painfully shy girl-woman unable to leave the confines of her home, the heterodox creator capable of conceiving the amoral Heathcliff, the brusque intellect unwilling to deal with normal society, and the ethereal soul too fragile to confront the temporal world. There is probably an element of truth as well as hyperbole in each of these views. Again, the fault lies in part with Charlotte, who in her effort to assuage the critical charge of "coarseness" aimed at the author of Wuthering Heights wrote a "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell" to accompany the 1850 edition of that novel and Anne's Agnes Grey. Of Brontë she wrote, "Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world." The real identity of the poet who created the fierce queens of Gondal and the visionaries of the subjective poetry lies somewhere between the shadowy myths about Brontë and the documented facts.

Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 in the parsonage at Thornton in Yorkshire to the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë, the fifth of their sixth children after Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Branwell and the only daughter to be given a middle name. Both parents displayed literary ambitions; Patrick Brontë's The Cottage in the Wood, an Evangelical tale supporting Sunday schools and castigating the evils of drinking, was published in 1815, and during the same year Maria Branwell wrote an apparently unpublished piece titled "The Advantages of Poverty, in Religious Concerns," a typically Methodist yet sincere and pious essay exhorting the faithful to care for the poor. In the year of Emily's birth Patrick's novella The Maid of Killarney was also published. Though Brontë continued throughout her life to observe her father's writing of sermons, articles, fiction, and poetry, she lost the example of her bright and vivacious mother shortly after the family's move to Haworth in 1820. Weakened by the birth of six children in as many years (Anne was born 17 January 1820), Maria Branwell was unable to fight off illness and died of cancer on 15 September 1821. Her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moved into the parsonage that same month to help Patrick care for his young family.

That Yorkshire played an important role in Brontë'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 Brontë children. Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), while admirable in many ways, was responsible for some of these errors. Recent biographies, especially Juliet Barker's The Brontës (1995), have sought to correct these misconceptions. Barker points out that Haworth was a "busy, industrial township," that Patrick was an involved and caring father, that Aunt Branwell's upbringing as a Wesleyan Methodist brought her closer to the gentler Church of England than to severe Calvinist beliefs, and that the six Brontë children enjoyed a "perfectly normal childhood" filled with games, lessons, religious education, and walks on the moors. Close in age and temperament, they provided each other with plenty of diversions. The Brontës' nursemaid, Sarah Garrs, reported that the children's games "were founded upon what Maria read to them from the newspapers, and the tales brought forth from the father's mines of tradition, history, and romance." Emily's participation in the playacting and daily walks would later significantly influence both her poetry and her fiction.

In 1824 several important changes occurred in the Brontë household. First, Sarah Garrs and her sister Nancy left the family, and Tabitha Aykroyd was engaged. Tabby remained with the Brontës until her death in 1855 and was accorded a place in the Haworth parsonage that far exceeded that of a mere servant. One of the few recorded incidents from Brontë's childhood also occurred during this year and illustrates the normalcy of the Brontë children's upbringing as well as the interest of their father in their development. Patrick Brontë, in helping Gaskell collect appropriate information for her biography of Charlotte, wrote her in a 30 July 1855 letter that he had used a mask to elicit honest responses from his children to his individual queries, "thinking that they knew more than I had yet discovered." He gave each one the mask and "told them all to stand and speak boldly." He asked Brontë, then aged about six, what he should do with her brother, Branwell, "who was sometimes a naughty boy." She answered, "Reason with him, and when he won't listen to reason, whip him." This answer seems to have arisen more from Emily's experience as a member of a large, active, and noisy set of siblings than from a quiet, doleful, and studious group.

More importantly, 1824 was the year that Patrick sent all of his daughters except Anne to Cowan Bridge School, a "School for Clergymen's Daughters." Patrick, though in possession of a perpetual curacy at Haworth, owned no land or inheritance and therefore had few options for providing for the future of his children. As in most Victorian families the bulk of the family income would be spent on the son's education. Yet Patrick knew he needed to enable his daughters to seek livings, most probably as teachers or governesses, and hence they needed to be educated. Miss Evans, the superintendent of the new school, called Brontë a "darling child" and "little petted Em," and the admissions register referred to her as "quite the pet nursling of the school." Tragically for the Brontë sisters, during the time they attended Cowan Bridge School it closely resembled the fictional Lowood School presented by Charlotte in Jane Eyre (1847). The staff at Cowan Bridge School was careless with respect to food preparation, and during the winter the rooms were often cold. The Brontë sisters had always been susceptible to coughs and colds, and the difficult physical conditions at Cowan Bridge most likely hastened Maria's and Elizabeth's contraction of consumption. They were sent home to die in 1825; after Patrick saw how ill Elizabeth was, he went to Cowan Bridge to collect Charlotte and Brontë himself. According to most biographers the deaths of their elder sisters most profoundly affected Charlotte, who had more complete memories of their deceased mother and now had also lost the sisters who had filled the maternal role. As Barker notes, all of Charlotte's heroines were orphans, and nearly all of the children in Wuthering Heights also become motherless. In her poetry many of Brontë's Gondal characters are also motherless, orphaned, or the children of parents who abandon them.

Between 1826 and 1829 Emily began music lessons, completed samplers, and made drawings and sketches of the natural subjects such as birds to which she was drawn for the remainder of her life. Her close observations of birds, animals, plants, and the changing skies over Haworth form a significant part of her poetry. During this time Branwell acquired several sets of toy figures such as soldiers, Turkish musicians, and Indians. These toys were the impetus for the founding of the imaginary lands of Angria and Gondal. The children began to write plays about the figures, with Emily and Charlotte composing "bed plays" that they kept secret from the adults as well as from Branwell and Anne. In "Tales of the Islanders" (1829) Charlotte gave a history of the early plays, underscoring Emily's early affiliation with the works of Sir Walter Scott, for she chose the Isle of Arran for her island and Scott for her "cheif [sic] man." This affinity grew with Aunt Branwell's 1828 New Year's gift to "her dear little nephew and nieces," a copy of Scott's The Tales of a Grandfather (1827-1829). In addition to Scott's works the Brontë children drew material for their plays from the family library of Aesop's Fables, The Arabian Nights' Entertainment, and wood-engraver Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds. Their most important influence during these early years was most likely Blackwood's Magazine, whose satires, political commentaries, and extensive book reviews provided them with a wealth of detail that seeded their imaginations throughout their early years of creativity.

In 1831, after Charlotte left for Roe Head School, Emily and Anne began to concentrate their energies exclusively on the Gondal saga, distinct from the Angrian fantasies of their brother and sister, a special form of imaginative play in which the two younger sisters alone engaged for the remainder of their lives. Emily's first mention of Gondal occurs in her diary paper for 24 November 1834, a series of notes written by Emily and Anne about every four years and the earliest piece of Brontë's writing to have survived. The first paragraph of the entry reads, "Taby said just now Come Anne pilloputate (i.e. pill a potato) Aunt has come into the kitchen just now and said where are you feet Anne Anne answered On the floor Aunt papa opened the parlour door and gave Branwell a letter saying here Branwell read this and show it to your Aunt and Charlotte--The Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally Mosley is washing in the back kitchen." In addition to noting the astonishing absence of punctuation conventions in the sixteen-year-old Emily's diary entry, critics uniformly point to her seamless fit of the imaginary Gondal into the fabric of everyday events in the Brontë kitchen.

Scholars such as W. D. Paden in An Investigation of Gondal (1958) have deftly recovered much of the history of Gondal despite Charlotte's destruction of the plays and prose after her sisters' deaths, from the birthday notes, the undated lists of character names Anne wrote, the list of place names she wrote into a copy of J. Goldsmith's A Grammar of General Geography (1819), and Emily's and Anne's Gondal poems. Most recognize, however, their own creative responsibility in such a reconstruction, for while Brontë wrote almost seventy poems that are undoubtedly part of the Gondal story, the majority of her poems cannot always be attributed to Gondal, and many are clearly more personal lyrics. Scholars therefore find Fannie Ratchford's Gondal's Queen: A Novel in Verse (1955), an attempt to fit the whole of Brontë's poetic output into the Gondal fantasy, an interesting but far-fetched effort. What can be determined is that Gondal, according to Anne, was "a large island in the North Pacific" and that Gaaldine was "a large island newly discovered in the South Pacific." The rigorous scenery of these islands derives much from Scott's fiction and is filled with mountains, heather, and snow. The Gondal stories concern impetuous royalty, political intrigue, love thwarted and abandoned, wars, murders, and assassinations. In a noteworthy article in 1939 Helen Brown was one of the first critics to point out the influence of George Gordon, Lord Byron, on Brontë's Gondal characters and their isolation, passions, dark crimes, and darker thoughts. The main character in Brontë's Gondal poems, the speaker of at least fourteen and the subject of many others, is the passionate, dark-haired queen Augusta G. Almeda, or A.G.A., perhaps based on Mary, Queen of Scots and the young Queen Victoria, in whose accession to the throne Brontë took a good deal of interest. A secondary character is Julius Brenzaida, king of Almedore in Gaaldine.

Critical reception of the Gondal poems has been uneven. Some critics reject them for their melodrama, formulaic qualities, and simplistic meters and rhymes. Recently, however, feminist critics have taken special note of the prominent role played by the queen, A.G.A. Christine Gallant, for example, calls attention to the fact that Gondal is "a mythic world emphatically excluding the real world" known to Victorian women, controlled by a "dominating presence of female figures." Teddi Lynn Chichester believes that Brontë was continually working through her own loss of significant female figures, that "through Augusta, Brontë could explore, in private, her need to create a powerful, even indestructible" woman, and that A.G.A. "ultimately reinforced the disturbing connection between mortality and the feminine" that is such a potent undercurrent in Western literature. Richard Benvenuto points out that without the years Brontë spent "developing her Gondal imagination, the mature imagination she did attain would have been a considerably different mode of vision." While a knowledge of the facts of Gondal can deepen the reader's understanding of Brontë's creative life, we can still appreciate the poems for their merits apart from their place in the Gondal saga. In writing the Gondal poems Brontë took on different voices and personae, and the themes of imprisonment and death that inform her better-known poetry were first explored therein. The dark and overpowering emotions first manifested in these poems certainly fed her invention of Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

The luxury Brontë enjoyed of freely flowing from domestic responsibilities at the parsonage to the world of Gondal and the mental and emotional sustenance she found therein was cut short in July 1835, when she accompanied Charlotte, now a teacher, to Roe Head. For Brontë--removed from her routine for the first time since she was six years old, extremely reticent and impatient with the other pupils in the school--the experiment was unhappy and unsuccessful. Moreover, because her daily schedule was now rigidly proscribed, she had no time to engage in the intellectually sustaining creation of the Gondal stories, and she was no longer living with Anne, her partner in the fantasy. Charlotte later recalled her firm belief that Brontë "would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall." Charlotte understood only too well the void caused by the absence of "sources purely imaginary": she too grieved for her inability to interact with her visions of Angria. The combination of homesickness and creative deprivation forced Brontë home in October 1835, but her dependence on Yorkshire to free her poetic originality should not be overstated. She forced herself to leave home again two more times, to teach at Law Hill and to study in Brussels, and these journeys broadened rather than stultified her inventive abilities.

Brontë spent the three years following her return from Roe Head at home, and since Anne had replaced her at the school, she became responsible for many of the domestic duties at the parsonage, especially after Tabby broke her leg. Brontë found time, however, to continue the Gondal saga and, more importantly, to practice her poetic craft. Though traumatic, her brief time at Roe Head and subsequent return to Haworth evidently intensified a new resolve to concentrate on her poetry. Her first extant poems are from 1836 and display some of the treatments of nature and death she was to concentrate on for the remainder of her life. For example, in "Will the day be bright or cloudy?" and "High waving heather 'neath stormy blasts ending," a poem Stevie Davies calls a "precocious bravura piece," Brontë adapts her close observation of natural phenomena to poems that examine and accept the two-faceted essence of the day's evolution and the changing weather. In "Start not upon the minster wall" she explores the comforting rather than threatening affinity of the living and the dead.

Brontë's diary paper of 26 June 1837 records Anne's writing of a poem, her own work on a volume of Augusta Almeda's life, Queen Victoria's accession to the throne, and her corresponding interest in the coronation of the emperors and empresses of Gondal and Gaaldine. She wonders where she and her siblings will be in four years and expresses three times the hope that whether they are in "this drawing room comfortable" or "gone somewhere together comfortable" that all will be for the best. The note is observant and cheerful and perhaps reflects the satisfaction Brontë took in her extensive composition of poetry during the year. Poems such as "The night of storms has passed," "A.G.A. to A.E.," "Now trust a heart that trusts in you," and "Song by Julius Angora" reveal a poetic exploration of Gondal corresponding to her Gondal prose. Her other poems from this period are somewhat problematic for critics in that, as Derek Roper says, they "plainly deal with fictional situations" yet do not belong to the Gondal cycle. Throughout her poetic career Brontë assumed personae who did not necessarily speak for her, and while it is difficult to assign certain poems to her own voice, it is important to be wary of attaching too much significance to the thoughts and feelings expressed in this fictional poetry. However, a poem from 1837 underscores in what seems to be Brontë's voice her need to express herself in poetry. The speaker asks heaven why it has denied the "glorious gift to many given / To speak their thoughts in poetry" and wonders why she cannot transmute her visions, available to her since "careless childhood's sunny time," into poetry. An aspect of this need can also be found in "I'll come when thou art saddest," a poem written in 1837, in which the speaker is the imagination, what Barker calls "the great comforter," upon which all of the Brontës relied for sustenance and consolation.

Brontë continued her poetic productivity throughout 1838, from which twenty-one dated poems have survived. Also surviving from this time are fragments of her translation of Virgil's Aeneid and notes on Greek tragedies, evidence that tends to contradict the fallacy that Brontë's was an uneducated mind from which sprang an amazing quantity of poetry and the remarkable Wuthering Heights. Sometime in the autumn of 1838 she made the surprising decision to accept a teaching position at Law Hill, a girls' school outside Halifax, a fact recorded in a letter from Charlotte to Ellen Nussey that, though dated October 1836, Edward Chitham revealed was postdated October 1838. Benvenuto speculates that Brontë went to Law Hill because she felt guilty enjoying the pleasures of home while her sisters were laboring at Roe Head. Though Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey that Brontë's duties at Law Hill constituted "slavery," Barker points out that Brontë had time to write what she calls "three outstanding poems." One of these was "A little while, a little while," a poem in which Brontë synchronizes the "dungeon bars" of her duties at school and her disparate choices of imagining during her "hour of rest" either the comforts of Hawthorn, the "spot 'mid barren hills," or Gondal with its "distant, dreamy dim blue chain / Of mountains circling every side." Charlotte was correct in surmising that Brontë would "never stand" the "hard labour" at Law Hill--she left the school in March or April 1839, worn out by homesickness and the lack of time she could devote to poetry and Gondal. Her return home again freed her from the "dungeon bars"; though she apparently wrote no poetry during the first three months of 1839, she left twenty-nine dated poems from the remainder of the year. She revisits some of her favorite natural subjects in poems such as "Mild the mist upon the hill" and "The starry night shall tidings bring," though often nature is unable to give solace to grief-stricken speakers. Brontë takes a more philosophical approach in "I am the only being whose doom," in which the speaker despairs to find "the same corruption" in "my own mind" as she has seen in all of "mankind," and "There was a time when my cheek burned," in which the speaker finds that her ardent devotion to truth, right, and liberty are misplaced, for the "same old world will go rolling on" unaffected by her passion or her indifference.

In her 30 July 1841 birthday note Brontë, though pleased that she and her family are all "stout and hearty," expressed her wish that four years hence she and her sisters will no longer be "dragging on" but will have carried out their "scheme" for setting up a school of their own. Though ultimately the plan was never realized, Emily and Charlotte attempted to improve their teaching prospects by studying French with Constantin Heger at the Pensionnat Heger, a boarding school for girls in Brussels, arriving in February 1842. After he recognized the sisters' intellectual strengths and their aptitude for French, Heger personally tutored them, having them read and analyze works in French and then compose their own essays based on these models. Though Brontë was unable to complete any poems while she was in Brussels, her composition of a prose allegory, "Le Palais de la Mort," influenced the second of the two poems she began, "Self-Interrogation." Both essay and poem personify Death, and in the poem Death logically convinces the human speaker in the dialogue that his life has been empty and that he has nothing left to live for. As Janet Gezari points out, "despite the ray of hope in the last two lines, this poem is among Brontë's glummest," its bitterness surely reflective of Aunt Branwell's November 1842 death, which caused Brontë and Charlotte to depart the Pensionnat for Haworth. Though Charlotte returned to Brussels in January 1843, Brontë remained in Yorkshire for the remainder of her life.

In February 1844 Brontë began to copy her poems into two notebooks, one titled "Gondal Poems," the other left untitled. Though early critics such as Winifred Gérin distinguished Gondal poems from "personal" poems on the basis of Brontë's division, later critics such as Roper and Barker caution against rigidity in approaching the poetry in this way. The act of copying itself suggests that Brontë took her poetry seriously and wanted to have a more permanent structure for it than scraps of paper allowed, even if at this point she did not even contemplate publication. In the autumn of 1845, however, a momentous discovery occurred. Charlotte recalled, "I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting." Despite Brontë's anger and sense of betrayal at her sister's "unlicensed" intrusion, its "taking hours to reconcile her to the discovery" Charlotte had made and "days to persuade her that such poems merited publication," Brontë eventually was won over to the idea of sending her work out to publishers along with some by Charlotte and Anne. The sisters spent the remainder of the year selecting and revising their poetry, Brontë choosing poems largely written in 1844 and 1845 and being careful to delete any references to the private Gondal. They took the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell and agreed to publish Poems at their own expense with the publishing company of Aylott and Jones in 1846.

Many critics agree that Brontë's poetry from Poems is her strongest. Lawrence J. Starzyk, for example, calls attention to the "beautiful lyrics" of "A Day Dream," where the "sustained dialogue of the mind with itself is masterfully executed as the despondent narrator converses with the joyous spirit of nature." Davies refers to "To Imagination" as "that classic, rational and balanced defence of imagination as an alternative faculty to reason." Barker believes that "The Prisoner," originally a Gondal poem, is "rightly one of Emily's most famous, as it includes the powerful and intensely emotional description of the captive's vision." Perhaps because Derek Stanford thinks that Brontë wrote only six major poems, his reading of "Death" and the "vertiginous and vertical excitement that seems to give this poem wings" is particularly striking. In one of the few stylistic analyses of Brontë's poetry C. Day Lewis finds that the effect of the rhythm in "Remembrance" is "extremely powerful, extremely appropriate" and that "it is the slowest rhythm I know in English poetry, and the most sombre." Roper concludes simply that "the selection that Emily made for 1846 includes some of her best poems."

Other than a long narrative Gondal poem from late 1846 and a shorter incomplete revision of the same from May 1848, Emily's last poem, much anthologized and perhaps the most commented upon, was "No Coward Soul Is Mine," written in January 1846. Tom Winnifrith calls it a "fitting culmination of Emily's poetic work," admiring the fineness of its "pantheistic vision"; Starzyk finds that the contradiction in the poem "represents a profound insight into the nature of the universe and man's attempt at finding permanence therein." This creation of a Methodist minister's daughter is indeed astonishing for its blunt rejection of orthodox religion--

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's heart, unutterably vain

Worthless as withered weeds

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

--coupled with its embrace of a truer and more sustaining omnipresence of God:

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears.

Brontë reveals her ability to actually know the supreme being who is the Alpha and Omega of whom she learned in the Bible when she was but a small child:

Though Earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be

And thou were left alone

Every existence would exist in thee.

Barker points out that "No Coward Soul Is Mine" is the "only statement of its kind in all of Brontë's extant writings," and so readers should not be quick to assume that the speaker is Brontë herself. However, the immediacy of the poem and the authenticity of the voice suggest that Brontë was not taking on a persona but indeed sharing her deeply felt relationship with God. We will unfortunately never know if she intended to continue to write poetry in this vein. Whether she was too dismayed by the lack of response to Poems or too distracted by the composition of Wuthering Heights, Brontë devoted little of her remaining two years to writing poetry.

In a 6 April 1846 letter Charlotte wrote to Aylott and Jones that "C., E., and A. Bell are now preparing for the press a work of fiction, consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales": Charlotte's The Professor (1857), Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Thomas Newby eventually consented to publish the latter two novels, which came out in December 1847. The first reviewers were mystified and puzzled by the strangeness and savagery of Wuthering Heights, although nearly all recognized the seductive power of the novel and the original vision of its author. Twentieth-century critics have recognized the ways in which the Gondal poetry, with its isolated and terrifying scenery, its passionate and grief-stricken characters, provided Emily with a wide stage on which to rehearse the similar scenery of Wuthering Heights and the characters of Cathy and Heathcliff in the novel. However, the critic who perhaps most perceptively synthesized the poetic and fictional halves of Emily's creative aptitude wrote at the end of the nineteenth century. A fellow poet, Algernon Swinburne, referred to Wuthering Heights in a 16 June 1883 article as "essentially and definitely a poem in the fullest and most positive sense of the term."

Little is known of the last two years of Emily's life, although her family endured some severe trials. Patrick was nearly blinded by cataracts, and Branwell, who had never realized his artistic potential, had returned home dependent on alcohol and disgraced because of an affair with his employer's wife. Branwell became ill with what probably was consumption in early September 1848 and died later that month. Emily Brontë fell ill with consumption in October 1848 and refused all medical help, claiming that even homeopathy "was only another form of quackery." She steadily grew weaker and died on 19 December 1848. She was thirty years old.

The student of Emily Brontë's poetry must sort through various contradictions in order to approach her work with even a little confidence. She wrote most of her poetry during what is technically the Victorian period, but her exploration of the self, the imagination, and the visionary associate her more closely with Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth than with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning. She was a woman poet who did not bemoan the lack of "literary grandmothers," as Elizabeth Barrett Browning did, and seemed to have little familiarity with female predecessors such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. She was a serious poet who, like her peers Emily Dickinson, John Clare, and, later, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote dozens of poems with no intention of publishing or even showing them to her family. She is far better known for her one mind-searing novel than for her poetry, but since early in the twentieth century few years have passed without some article, book, or new edition devoted to her verse. Her life remains an enigma; her poetry refuses easy classification. Yet Brontë's fierce willingness to confront in her poetry the most profound intellectual, theological, and emotional challenges to the human spirit assures her a continuing place in the minds of readers who seek guidance through those obstacles in poetry.
— Siobhan Craft Brownson, Winthrop University

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