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On Emily’s Moor
by Caroline Gill

You walkers flock like ravens from the fell,
with eyes of flint; ignited by a flame —
a spark extinguished by a cruel knell.
Consumption struck, but Emily found fame.
She stamped her presence on these Haworth hills,
where shadows fall like lead; eclipse the sun
and cling like cobwebs when the vixen howls.
Night canters through the sky, where stars once shone.
Beware the moor — seek out the Brontë Way:
press on past Enshaw Knoll towards Black Leech.
Don’t linger on the rocks, or ask me why
wild horses hang in mist beyond your reach.
Top Withens stands, though Emily’s steps fail
to come. Go home: you won’t forget her tale.


Published in: Seventh Quarry issue 1 (ed. Peter Thabit Jones).
Metverse Muse (ed. Dr H. Tulsi, Visakhapatnam,
India, Silver Jubilee Issue, March 2009 p.112).

N.B. I have followed the Brontë Society spelling of
‘Withens’ (as on the B.S. plaque), rather than the oldest
recorded version of the word, ‘Withins’.




 


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ed. “Whatever that centering is, it is purely individual, and as beyond gender as it is beyond creed or ‘high morality.’” (“Introduction,” The Brontës, ed. Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, p. 11)
Firmly rooted in this world that is the world of each of us, she “will seek not the shadowy region,” whose “unsustaining vastness waxes drear.” It is to this world, rendered uncanny, eerie, sublime, that her nature would be leading, this finite existence bounded by death, where waked to feeling we find or make what glory and what grief we may know.

Do I read too much of myself into the poem? Perhaps, tightroping a fine line, for we always bring ourselves to encounters with writers, reading ourselves and our stories into them and theirs, no matter how we try to be open to what may be there independent of our reading. I do not know if these brief remarks shed any illumination on why I respond to this poem as I do. Perhaps it can only be said that I simply love it, as we sometimes love those things that we come to call art. Emily wakes my heart to feeling and carries me away.

 


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