A Poem by Emily Brontë

Today, I thought of sharing a five stanza-poem by Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights. It is titled “Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning”, and despite its tenderness, showcases the author’s steely determination to seek freedom, follow her own inner voice, and forge her own path forward irrespective of all the scholarly dogma and independent of her sisters or society. Her creative realm would be a place neither wholly imaginary nor objectively perceivable, but still real, like her characters Heathcliff and Catherine’s emotional world, unseen by others, but still as real to them as any observable-by-others objective reality.

–//–//–//–//–// –

“Often rebuked, yet always back returning

    To those first feelings that were born with me,

And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning

    For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

–

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;

    Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;

And visions rising, legion after legion,

    Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

–

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,

    And not in paths of high morality,

And not among the half-distinguished faces,

    The clouded forms of long-past history.

–

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:

    It vexes me to choose another guide:

Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;

    Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

–

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?

    More glory and more grief than I can tell:

The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling

    Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.”

–//–//–//–//–// –

Emily Brontë