inspirations

my passion for the brontes, or rather emily, has been banged on about,
admitedly, exclusively, by myself.

there are few to no pictures of her, apart from the well-known family
portrait executed by her brother branwell (who erased himself from the ensemble
painting, an alcoholic and drug addict, natch). As a child she created an
alternate universe for herself, where she would take refuge from the world.
At the beginning, it was an imaginary world shared with her sisters, where they
exorcised their demons and found an outlet for their pent-up creativity
and frustrations. But she lived out "Gondal" into adulthood and never
renounced it. It was the one place where she was who she was, defied all
logic, all rules and where everything impossible became possible.
We may never know how great her poetry was, beyond what survives,
she burnt so much of it.
she assumed a man's pseudonym. and something of her fantasy survives:
"the same unreality of this world, the same greater reality of another,...
and a unique imagination."


The Prisoner (fragment)

"Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulph, it stoops and dares the final bound,

"Oh dreadful is the check--intense the agony--
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

"Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald death, the vision is divine!"

She ceased to speak, and we, unanswering, turned to go--
We had no further power to work the captive woe:
Her cheek, her gleaming eye, declared that man had given
A sentence, unapproved, and overruled by Heaven.



Emily Jane Brontë (July 30, 1818 – December 19, 1848)
died age, not yet, 30.