Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Selected Poems
    Selected Poems
    Selected Poems
    Ebook188 pages1 hour

    Selected Poems

    By Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and Stevie Davies

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Although The Brontes have long fascinated readers of fiction and biography, their poetry was all too little known until this pioneering selection by Stevie Davies, the novelist and critic. Charlotte (1816-1855) is certainly a competent poet, and Anne (1820-1849) developed a distinctive voice, while Emily (1818-1848) is one of great women poets in English. All three sisters, as Stevie Davies remarks in her introduction, were Romantic in inspiration, writing poetry of passionate personal feeling and of pure imagination. they share certain themes - liberty, loneliness, love - and harbour the myth of a lost paradise. Read together with their novels, the poems movingly elucidate the ideas around which the narratives revolve. And they surprise us out of our conventional notions of the sisters' personalities: Emily's rebelliousness, for example, is counterbalanced here by great tenderness. This selection gives an idea of the variety of thought and feeling within each authors's work, and of the way in which the poems of these three remarkable writers parallel and reflect each other.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFyfield Books
    Release dateJul 27, 2012
    ISBN9781847779854
    Selected Poems
    Author

    Anne Brontë

    Anne Brontë (1820–1849) was an English poet and novelist—the youngest of the famous Brontë sisters. Throughout her brief career, she developed a reputation as an unwaveringly realistic writer in an era when candor was uncommon. Brontë was first published with her sisters under a pseudonym, with the poetry collection Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell in 1846. She then wrote the semiautobiographical Agnes Grey and followed that with the daring Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Soon after the deaths of her sister Emily and her brother, Branwell, Brontë succumbed to tuberculosis and died.

    Read more from Anne Brontë

    Related to Selected Poems

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      You’ll Need Me When They’re Gone: The Poems We Reach For in Grief

      Nov 14, 2019

      I am all too aware of the place contemporary poetry occupies for most people: They reach for poems when they’re in love or when they’re coping with death. The post You’ll Need Me When They’re Gone: The Poems We Reach For in Grief appeared first on Th

      9 min read

    • Article

      What The Thunder Said

      Sep 14, 2022

      ON Margate Sands./I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot crafted these short lines that form a part of his fractured epic The Waste Land in October 1921, as he sat in the inauspicious Nayland Rock Shelter (granted Grade II

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Waste Land turns 100

      Oct 19, 2022

      The Waste Land turns 100
      5 min read

    • Article

      Obsession Is Universal

      Apr 19, 2018

      Is there art without obsession? Obsession is endemic to the human condition.  It drives creation like sunlight nourishes plants. If artists are observers of human follies and failings, then depicting obsession comes with the terrain.  Three recently

      6 min read

    • Article

      ‘The Kingdom of Ends’

      Nov 1, 2024

      ‘The Kingdom of Ends’
      16 min read

    • Article

      Books Of The Month

      Jan 13, 2023

      By Meena Kandasamy A translation of the third part of the Tirukkural, one of the earliest works of Tamil poetry. As Kandasamy explains, Tamil poetry has long been sidelined within Indian culture, with the explicit content of The Book of Desire attrac

      2 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Sep 4, 2023

      It isn’t exactly an iconoclastic take that the Booker Prize, which released its latest longlist last month, is about as useful a way of discovering the year’s best literary releases as blue-tick Twitter is for finding people who aren’t mental. The om

      3 min read

    • Article

      Write What You Know? Identity Politics and Fiction

      Oct 11, 2017

      If it weren’t so illustrative of the loaded identitarian schism at the heart of leftist politics, it would make for the perfect right-wing conspiracy: not only have well-meaning liberals become too PC, they are now roundly dismissed as blinkered by t

      14 min read

    • Article

      The Widower's Lament

      Mar 4, 2024

      STEVEN G. KELLMAN’S books include Rambling Prose, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, and The Translingual Imagination. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. —Emily Dickinson I had been asleep for a few hours when the policeman a

      12 min read

    • Article

      A 350th-Anniversary ‘Paradise Lost’ Reading List

      Feb 6, 2018

      Before John Milton could be a visionary writer, first he had to be a visionary reader. All poetry is supported by the accumulated scaffolding of tradition and defines itself in part by subverting that tradition. Milton was simultaneously partisan for

      16 min read

    • Article

      In The Middle Of Even This: Poetry

      Jan 1, 2020

      To be brought from the bright schoolyard into the house:to stand by her bed like an animal stunned in the pen:against the grid of the quilt, her hand seemsstitched to the cuff of its sleeve—although he wantsmost urgently the hand to stroke his head,a

      7 min read

    • Article

      She Was The Toast Of The World

      Jun 1, 2022

      She Was The Toast Of The World
      8 min read

    • Article

      Paradise Dimmed

      Jun 29, 2023

      In 1868, the writer John William De Forest coined the term “The Great American Novel” to describe an epic in prose that would “paint the American soul”, capture national ideals and manners, and help unify the United States after the Civil War. He hop

      8 min read

    • Article

      September Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

      Sep 1, 2022

      These are the 27 books that we can't wait to read this month. The post September Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      How The Sonnet Turns

      May 1, 2020

      This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, on January 10, 2010, at the winter residency. My thanks to The American Poetry Review for their graceful and gracious assistance in the adaptation

      30 min read

    • Article

      The Siren’s Call

      Dec 3, 2020

      The Siren’s Call
      4 min read

    • Article

      Life After Wartime

      Oct 11, 2019

      Life After Wartime
      4 min read

    • Article

      Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2017 Book Preview

      Jul 11, 2017

      It's the (second) most wonderful time of the year. The post Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2017 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

      26 min read

    • Article

      Love Your Bookstore: Greenlight Bookstore

      Nov 13, 2019

      For this year's Love Your Bookstore Challenge, the staff at Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore share their colorful and varied must-read titles. The post Love Your Bookstore: Greenlight Bookstore appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: August 2017

      Aug 7, 2017

      This is a book to share, a poetic window into someone “standing in line / behind you / the girl you’re pretending not to notice.” The post Must-Read Poetry: August 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 4, 2022

      Books
      3 min read

    • Article

      Transatlantic Flights

      May 3, 2024

      Transatlantic Flights
      13 min read

    • Article

      Shining and Whole: In Remembrance of Donald Hall

      Jul 6, 2018

      Wandering the aisles made of beige steel and unrememberable carpet that was the poetry section of my local suburban library, I waited for poetry to come to me. What arrived was The Painted Bed, a collection by Donald Hall. I could’ve opened it to any

      4 min read

    • Article

      Books Of The Month

      Apr 7, 2023

      By Yang Lian, translated by Brian Holton In exile from China since 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre, Yang Lian is a writer of world significance; his admirers include Ai Weiwei, who designed the cover of his latest book. Its title evokes the exile’s

      2 min read

    • Article

      Dark Hooks

      Nov 1, 2021

      The critical canon has spent decades wringing its hands over Sylvia Plath’s appropriation of both Jewish identity and the particular tragedy of the Holocaust. In 1969, George Steiner wrote in his essay “In Extremis” that Plath “… was a child, plump a

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Selected Poems

    3.5/5

    11 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Selected Poems - Anne Brontë

      SELECTED POEMS

      C

      HARLOTTE

      B

      RONTË

      (1816-1855) is best known for her novels, Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1853) and The Professor (1857). A collection of poems by Charlotte and her sisters Emily and Anne was published in 1846.

      E

      MILY

      B

      RONTË

      (1818-1848) is best known for her novel Wuthering Heights (1847).

      A

      NNE

      B

      RONTË

      (1820-1849) is best known for her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

      S

      TEVIE

      D

      AVIES

      is a literary critic, novelist, historian and biographer. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1998, and now works as the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Wales in Swansea, her home town. She taught English Literature at Manchester University before becoming a full-time author in 1984. She has written four distinguished books on Emily Brontë and edited Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for Penguin Classics. Her history of the seventeenth century, A Century of Troubles (2001), accompanied a Channel 4 TV series. Stevie Davies’ first novel, Boy Blue, won the Fawcett Prize in 1989 and her latest novel, The Element of Water (Women’s Press, 2001) was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

      FyfieldBooks present poetry and prose by great as well as sometimes overlooked writers from British and Continental literatures. Clean texts at affordable prices, FyfieldBooks make available authors whose works endure within our literary tradition.

      The series takes its name from the Fyfield elm mentioned in Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ and in his ‘Thyrsis’. The elm stood close to the building in which the Fyfield series was first conceived in 1971.

      Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

      Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

      Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

      from ‘Thyrsis’

      THE BRONTË SISTERS

      Selected Poems

      Edited with an introduction by

      STEVIE DAVIES

      To the dear memory of my Father

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Introduction

      The Brontës as Poets

      Charlotte Brontë

      Emily Jane Brontë

      Anne Brontë

      Poems by Charlotte Brontë

      Lines Addressed to ‘The Tower of All Nations’

      Written upon the Occasion of the Dinner Given to the Literati of the Glasstown

      Home-Sickness

      from Retrospection

      The Wounded Stag

      ‘Turn not now for comfort here’

      ‘He could not sleep! – the couch of war’

      The Teacher’s Monologue

      Diving

      Gods of the Old Mythology

      Parting

      Preference

      Morning

      Master and Pupil

      Reason

      ‘He saw my heart’s woe, discovered my soul’s anguish’

      On the Death of Emily Jane Brontë

      On the Death of Anne Brontë

      Poems by Emily Jane Brontë

      ‘High waving heather, ’neath stormy blasts bending’

      ‘All day I’ve toiled, but not with pain’

      ‘I am the only being whose doom’

      ‘Only some spires of bright green grass’

      ‘Now trust a heart that trusts in you’

      A. G. A. (‘Sleep brings no joy to me’)

      ‘I’ll come when thou art saddest’

      ‘I’m happiest when most away’

      Song (‘King Julius left the south country’)

      ‘And now the house-dog stretched once more’

      ‘Shed no tears o’er that tomb’

      A. A. A. (‘Sleep not, dream not; this bright day’)

      Song (‘O between distress and pleasure’)

      ‘There was a time when my cheek burned’

      ‘Well, some may hate, and some may scorn’

      ‘It is too late to call thee now’

      ‘Riches I hold in light esteem’

      ‘Shall Earth no more inspire thee’

      ‘Aye, there it is! It wakes to-night’

      How Clear She Shines!

      ‘In the earth, the earth, thou shalt be laid’

      A. G. A. to A. S. (‘This summer wind, with thee and me’)

      ‘Come, walk with me’

      To Imagination

      ‘O thy bright eyes must answer now’

      The Philosopher’s Conclusion

      R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida (‘Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee!’)

      ‘Death, that struck when I was most confiding’

      ‘Ah! why, because the dazzling sun’

      ‘How beautiful the Earth is still’

      from Julian M. and A. G. Rochelle

      ‘No coward soul is mine’

      ‘Why ask to know what date, what clime?’

      Stanzas (‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning’)

      Poems by Anne Brontë

      A Voice from the Dungeon

      The North Wind

      Verses to a Child

      Retirement

      Despondency

      To Cowper

      A Word to the ‘Elect’

      Past Days

      A Reminiscence

      A Prayer

      Night

      Dreams

      If This be All

      Song (‘We know where deepest lies the snow’)

      Song (‘Come to the banquet; triumph in your songs!’)

      Oh, They Have Robbed Me of the Hope

      Domestic Peace

      Severed and Gone

      Farewell to Thee! But Not Farewell

      Last Lines

      Notes

      Copyright

      PREFACE

      My text of the poems by Charlotte and Anne Brontë is based on the Shakespeare Head edition of The Poems of Charlotte Brontë and Patrick Branwell Brontë and The Poems of Emily Jane Brontë and Anne Brontë (Oxford, 1934), edited by T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington. However, for the poems of Emily Jane Brontë, I have used C. W. Hatfield’s invaluable edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (New York, 1941). Of the wealth of Brontë scholarship, I must particularly mention my debt to F. E. Ratchford’s reconstruction of the Gondal and Angrian stories in The Brontës’ Web of Childhood (New York, 1941) and to W. Gérin’s Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford, 1967).

      I should like to thank Rosalie Wilkins for her constant encouragement. And I am deeply grateful to Douglas Brooks for all his kindness, especially in advising me on the preparation of the notes.

      Stevie Davies

      Manchester

      INTRODUCTION

      The Brontës as Poets

      Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë are generally far better known as novelists than poets. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights are the masterpieces everyone still recalls from childhood, and they hold something of the haunting quality of having long been assimilated into one’s personal history. The lives of the three have likewise entered the collective consciousness, which has proceeded to mythologize them, so that the village where they lived, Haworth in Yorkshire, is the destination of hosts of visitors to the north of England. Haworth itself clusters around that century-old myth: its cafés, streets and souvenir shops bear their name and all its signposts seem to point in their direction.

      There are various consequences of the perpetuation of their bleak and romantic story as a kind of folk-memory. First, their names have become a kind of sentimental public property, and interest in their nature as opposed to their work takes on the character of an assault. It is not only that the tiny parsonage at Haworth resounds with the footsteps of the curious – a fact that would have appalled the sisters as a nightmare incursion on their reserve. There are also the biographical works which prodigiously swell Brontë criticism, not to mention the whimsical plays and novels, whose protagonist is less likely to be the individual Brontë than the consumption that made off with her. It is often assumed that their whole lives are important only as a prelude to those heartrendingly early deaths.

      In the hierarchy created by romantic taste, therefore, the lives come first, the novels (as an index to those lives) second, and the poems last, a condition which has changed little since The Poems of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were received in 1846 by an indifferent public, which could not be persuaded into buying more than a total of two copies. The edition had later to be destroyed as unsaleable. Yet none of the Brontës is a negligible poet, and Emily is a great one. They were Romantic in inspiration, writing both passionate confessional

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1