A Twinship

     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.