After thinking about Anne Bronte so late on Wednesday, I couldn't get away from her family on Thursday, and even this morning, while I walked, I was remembering small scenes from Emily's life. Ellen Nussey saw Anne and Emily as having a kind of twinship, although they were quite different in their personalities. Charlotte said, "Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils," and although she could tolerate taking classes in Brussels with Charlotte since their purpose was to open a school of their own, being at home in Haworth with the moors at her back door was everything to her.
Speaking personally, I admire Wuthering Heights immensely. By any standards, it's a masterpiece. But I don't reread it very much. On the other hand, I can read her poems anytime and find myself happy to be in their world. Some of her works could be Donizetti arias -- "Cold in the earth with the deep snow piled above thee" and "Death that struck when I was most confiding" -- but even the ones with the simplest opening, like "The linnet in the rocky dells," have a powerful energy that lifts me up and does me good, although I'd be hard-pressed to explain what "good" means.
The scenes I remember from her life are the scenes everyone remembers from the biographies: Emily taking the hot poker and cauterizing the bite on her arm that could have been given by a dog with rabies, Emily kneading the dough for the family's bread with a German book propped up in front of her, Emily insisting on feeding the dogs the day before she died, even though she could hardly walk, and then dying without even being able to recognize the sprig of heather Charlotte had found for her on the moors.
In a poem I wrote for Emily, I let her speak in her own voice and say what she had no strength for and wouldn't have found any need for. but I had a need to say it for her:
Death Too Is Life for Emily, December 1848
These winter winds,
your heather,
the triune sun
we saw together,
sang to me in their glory,
"Before the daystar,
like the dew,
we have begotten you."
There is only one life,
one story.
Heathcliff and Branwell
and Anne
are a hawk and a hound
and a spaniel.
Hero and Keeper
and Flossy
are Queens of the South.
The moors in the moonlight
can rival great
Solomon's temple.
The birth of a verse
is as sweet
as the Shulamith's mouth.
(For those who don't remember Emily's life in detail: Hero was Emily's hawk; Keeper, her dog; and Flossy, Anne's spaniel. And one time on Ellen's visit to Haworth, she and the Brontes saw an atmospheric phenomenon called -- I think -- a perihelion, which shows the sun and a reflection on each side of it. Looking at the three suns, Ellen exclaimed, "Those are the three of you.")
I was happy to learn that Emily Dickinson, who had just turned 18 when Emily Bronte died, also loved her work and that one of the older Emily's poems ("No coward soul is mine") was read while Emily's coffin was lying in her house at Amherst.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
I had something in mind to write today when I happened to look at the date, May 28th, and changed my plans. When I was younger, I was so immersed in the lives of the Brontes (and have never really become un-immersed) that I had no trouble recognizing today as the anniversary of the death of Anne Bronte. She died May 28, 1849 and was buried in Scarborough, where she had gone, accompanied by Charlotte and Charlotte's friend, Ellen Nussey, to spend her last days in a place she loved, where she could see and hear and smell the sea.
The account of her death in the biographies by Juliet Barker and Winifred Gerin is so moving, I can't remember reading a greater one even in the lives of the saints. She accepted what was happening, tried to be as little a burden as possible to her family, took all the nauseating and useless remedies without complaint, and waited for death to come to her with a steady strength of character.
Although I admire all the Brontes greatly, she is the one I most hope to resemble when my own time comes. I love her poetry, like both her novels and respect her willingness to write about people's appalling behavior without sugarcoating it. She looked at her employers and their children with clear eyes, and I was glad that the daughters of the awful Mrs. Robinson turned to her for wisdom and warmth even after she returned home.
I don't know if she loved her father's curate, Willie Weightman, but it wouldn't be surprising if she did, since he seemed to be thoroughly likable and genuinely, deep-down kind and self-sacrificing in the best sense. There is no indication that he loved her, so it's possible that she also had to suffer the grief of being unloved by a man she cared for very much. She also lived to suffer the agonizing loss of Emily, as well as her brother and her aunt.
Thirty years ago, I wrote poems for all the Brontes, including the parents, so I will close today's post with 29-year-old Anne's:
Anne Bronte Discloses the Secret of Her Peace
Whatever connects
God's world to this
runs through me.
Even exhausted
by four great griefs
I feel it --
a Something
stretched under
flesh and air.
My hands let go.
My feet balance themselves
on prayer.
Hour by hour
this soft sweet May,
I slip through
the open doorway.
The account of her death in the biographies by Juliet Barker and Winifred Gerin is so moving, I can't remember reading a greater one even in the lives of the saints. She accepted what was happening, tried to be as little a burden as possible to her family, took all the nauseating and useless remedies without complaint, and waited for death to come to her with a steady strength of character.
Although I admire all the Brontes greatly, she is the one I most hope to resemble when my own time comes. I love her poetry, like both her novels and respect her willingness to write about people's appalling behavior without sugarcoating it. She looked at her employers and their children with clear eyes, and I was glad that the daughters of the awful Mrs. Robinson turned to her for wisdom and warmth even after she returned home.
I don't know if she loved her father's curate, Willie Weightman, but it wouldn't be surprising if she did, since he seemed to be thoroughly likable and genuinely, deep-down kind and self-sacrificing in the best sense. There is no indication that he loved her, so it's possible that she also had to suffer the grief of being unloved by a man she cared for very much. She also lived to suffer the agonizing loss of Emily, as well as her brother and her aunt.
Thirty years ago, I wrote poems for all the Brontes, including the parents, so I will close today's post with 29-year-old Anne's:
Anne Bronte Discloses the Secret of Her Peace
Whatever connects
God's world to this
runs through me.
Even exhausted
by four great griefs
I feel it --
a Something
stretched under
flesh and air.
My hands let go.
My feet balance themselves
on prayer.
Hour by hour
this soft sweet May,
I slip through
the open doorway.
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Why the Sky?
About me:
When I look back over almost 70 years, I realize I had twelve spiritual teachers when I was young. My first was the sky, the day sky of clouds and the night sky of stars. The second was the George Washington Bridge, which stretched like a low-flying angel over the Hudson. The third was my mother. The fourth was my parish church, where God lived in a beautiful gold box on the altar. The fifth was the sign outside our neighborhood synagogue. The letters looked like musical notes from the songs that the angels were singing way over our heads. The sixth was my mother's garden -- the azaleas she grew on the fire escape, weather permitting.
The seventh was the children's room in our local branch of the New York Public Library. There I first met Sara Crewe, Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Princess, who was a spiritual master in her own right. The eighth was Anne of Green Gables and the transcendently beautiful setting in which she lived. The ninth was Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and all the stories in that series, which taught -- without preaching -- the values of practical helpfulness and emotional honesty. The tenth was the Cloisters, the museum that brought the Middle Ages alive in painting, sculpture and music, and that I lived close enough to walk to. The eleventh was rain -- spring showers, summer thunderstorms, and the cold blowing rains of autumn and winter. The twelfth was my friend Susan.
And now, after living for almost 40 years in and around Orlando, I'm a retired English teacher, a retired mental health counselor and an active writer. With the encouragement of my husband, Jerry, another spiritual master, and the warm support of my tabby Lizzie, I've been collecting my stories and poems for children as well as cat-themed (!) short stories for adults and putting them on Kindle. It's been a rich life. . . .
_______________________________________________________
Here's my first post:
When my friend's son was two years old, he wouldn't go to bed before looking at the moon. He would insist, "Moon, I want moon," and his mother would have to take him out into the driveway. If he couldn't find the moon, she would tell him it was behind the trees and would come out after he was asleep. That satisfied him. He'd had his taste of moon.
The first time I watched this, I thought back over fifty years to the time I was ten or twelve, when I would stand at the window of my bedroom and stare at the stars. I worried obsessively about getting my homework done, but as soon as I pressed my face to the glass and looked above the roofs of the neighboring buildings, I could see the stars and they obliterated everything else.
That greatness could be so tiny, that time could fall away, leaving only eternity, that I somehow belonged to the sky, although there was no visible connection between us -- all these were a miracle, an abiding astonishment.
(I learned that expression "abiding astonishment" from the Jewish philosopher, Emil Fackenheim, when I went to a lecture he gave, shortly after I graduated from college. He used it to describe an event like the crossing of the Red Sea, which leaves the participants and their descendants with a sense of awe that never goes away.)
When I think back further, I realize that my first flashes of memory also involved the sky. I had a split-second of consciousness while I was standing in my crib. I can still see the curtains of the window next to my crib as well as the sky beyond. I also remember going around the corner of the street outside our apartment building when I was three years old to get something from a "candy store," as people in NYC called a news agent who also sold candy, gum and soda. I was coming back when a storm began to blow up. I stared at the clouds and felt frightened, not for myself but for my mother who was safely inside our living room.
Years later, I asked my mother if I could really have been allowed out by myself when I was three. "Oh yes," she said, being full of confidence in me and amazingly, almost unbelievably, naïve about danger.
Our original apartment was right on the approach to the George Washington Bridge in upper Manhattan, so there was a wide spread of sky over the Hudson River, where sunsets could be dazzling. I went back to that neighborhood even after we moved ten blocks away, because I felt "called" to this big sky country (and I offer my apologies to the people of Montana, which no doubt has a better right to the title).
But beyond the beauty of the physical sky, there seems to be another dimension, at least for me. I remember when I worked as a counselor that I was always listening not only to what people said but what they meant by what they said. I wanted to learn the meaning of what they were telling me. Or in other words, why they were telling it. Usually I could do that, but one time I was so exhausted -- burned out, really -- that I couldn't get my understanding up high enough to see the point of it all. The key word here is "up."
Since "sky" is almost synonymous with "up," I think of the sky as the place where the meanings live. Where coherence lives. Where whatever pulls our stories, our poems, our lives into meaningful shape has its seat of power. But more about that later!
When I look back over almost 70 years, I realize I had twelve spiritual teachers when I was young. My first was the sky, the day sky of clouds and the night sky of stars. The second was the George Washington Bridge, which stretched like a low-flying angel over the Hudson. The third was my mother. The fourth was my parish church, where God lived in a beautiful gold box on the altar. The fifth was the sign outside our neighborhood synagogue. The letters looked like musical notes from the songs that the angels were singing way over our heads. The sixth was my mother's garden -- the azaleas she grew on the fire escape, weather permitting.
The seventh was the children's room in our local branch of the New York Public Library. There I first met Sara Crewe, Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Princess, who was a spiritual master in her own right. The eighth was Anne of Green Gables and the transcendently beautiful setting in which she lived. The ninth was Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and all the stories in that series, which taught -- without preaching -- the values of practical helpfulness and emotional honesty. The tenth was the Cloisters, the museum that brought the Middle Ages alive in painting, sculpture and music, and that I lived close enough to walk to. The eleventh was rain -- spring showers, summer thunderstorms, and the cold blowing rains of autumn and winter. The twelfth was my friend Susan.
And now, after living for almost 40 years in and around Orlando, I'm a retired English teacher, a retired mental health counselor and an active writer. With the encouragement of my husband, Jerry, another spiritual master, and the warm support of my tabby Lizzie, I've been collecting my stories and poems for children as well as cat-themed (!) short stories for adults and putting them on Kindle. It's been a rich life. . . .
_______________________________________________________
Here's my first post:
When my friend's son was two years old, he wouldn't go to bed before looking at the moon. He would insist, "Moon, I want moon," and his mother would have to take him out into the driveway. If he couldn't find the moon, she would tell him it was behind the trees and would come out after he was asleep. That satisfied him. He'd had his taste of moon.
The first time I watched this, I thought back over fifty years to the time I was ten or twelve, when I would stand at the window of my bedroom and stare at the stars. I worried obsessively about getting my homework done, but as soon as I pressed my face to the glass and looked above the roofs of the neighboring buildings, I could see the stars and they obliterated everything else.
That greatness could be so tiny, that time could fall away, leaving only eternity, that I somehow belonged to the sky, although there was no visible connection between us -- all these were a miracle, an abiding astonishment.
(I learned that expression "abiding astonishment" from the Jewish philosopher, Emil Fackenheim, when I went to a lecture he gave, shortly after I graduated from college. He used it to describe an event like the crossing of the Red Sea, which leaves the participants and their descendants with a sense of awe that never goes away.)
When I think back further, I realize that my first flashes of memory also involved the sky. I had a split-second of consciousness while I was standing in my crib. I can still see the curtains of the window next to my crib as well as the sky beyond. I also remember going around the corner of the street outside our apartment building when I was three years old to get something from a "candy store," as people in NYC called a news agent who also sold candy, gum and soda. I was coming back when a storm began to blow up. I stared at the clouds and felt frightened, not for myself but for my mother who was safely inside our living room.
Years later, I asked my mother if I could really have been allowed out by myself when I was three. "Oh yes," she said, being full of confidence in me and amazingly, almost unbelievably, naïve about danger.
Our original apartment was right on the approach to the George Washington Bridge in upper Manhattan, so there was a wide spread of sky over the Hudson River, where sunsets could be dazzling. I went back to that neighborhood even after we moved ten blocks away, because I felt "called" to this big sky country (and I offer my apologies to the people of Montana, which no doubt has a better right to the title).
But beyond the beauty of the physical sky, there seems to be another dimension, at least for me. I remember when I worked as a counselor that I was always listening not only to what people said but what they meant by what they said. I wanted to learn the meaning of what they were telling me. Or in other words, why they were telling it. Usually I could do that, but one time I was so exhausted -- burned out, really -- that I couldn't get my understanding up high enough to see the point of it all. The key word here is "up."
Since "sky" is almost synonymous with "up," I think of the sky as the place where the meanings live. Where coherence lives. Where whatever pulls our stories, our poems, our lives into meaningful shape has its seat of power. But more about that later!
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