Emily Brontë and Shelley

Abstract

The wind I hear it sighing With Autumn’s saddest sound …

Though the wind blowing round Haworth parsonage on 29 October 1839 was, according to Shackleton, a north-easterly, Emily’s poem reminds us of Shelley’s ‘West Wind’, the ‘breath of Autumn’s being’. So well known to Emily was this west wind that she considered the east ‘an uninteresting wind’,¹ and is able to begin poem 148 with ‘Aye there it is! It wakes tonight/Sweet thoughts that will not die’ without specifying the nature of ‘it’ until the third stanza. There follows a poem rich in Shelleyan concepts, ending in true platonic style with the soul separating from its imprisoning body:

Thus truly when that breast is cold Thy prisoned soul shall rise, The dungeon mingle with the mould — The captive with the skies.

That Emily Brontë was deeply attached to Shelleyan ideas is well known. There is, however, a tendency to ascribe this to coincidence. Winifred Gerin, for example, writing in 1971 says:

A common vision informed their work even if Shelley’s Platonism derived from a long study of the Greek philosophers, whilst Emily’s was purely intuitive and personal. If, untaught as she was, she thought and wrote at times like Shelley, it was out of a natural sympathy.