Emily Brontë: Freedom from Absolute Sorrow

The quietest ‘groan’, for Emily Brontë, could suggest that earthly sorrow has an absolute quality:

One hardly uttered groan –

But that has hushed all vocal joy,

Eclipsed the glory of the sky

And made me think that misery

Rules in our world alone! (Brontë: 172)

In Brontë’s poem ‘The Two Children’, absolute sorrow appears as the fated sorrow of the figure destined to a ‘grim fate’ (216), who – as Janet Gezari comments in the notes to her edition of Brontë’s poems – ‘anticipates Heathcliff, bereft of Guardian Angel or “kindred kindness”‘ (277).

Soul – where kindred kindness,

No early promise woke,

Barren is thy beauty,

As weed upon a rock. (217)

One of Brontë’s most devastating quatrains returns to how grief, like a lack of kindred kindness, results in a complete stilling of joy, as trauma decisively inhibits our capacity for experience:

In dungeons dark I cannot sing

In sorrow’s thrall ’tis hard to smile

What bird can soar with broken wing

What heart can bleed and joy the while (78)

The close of another poem pairs fated obscure sorrow or sorrowful obscurity – ‘it is doomed’ – with the way in which bereavement stunts early development: the organic growth of a child’s emotional life. As Gezari remarks, ‘the feeling is very different’ (242) here to in the comparable lines from Gray’s Elegy (‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air’); because in Brontë’s lines it is only specifically the bereaved environment which has turned the child’s morning light into a preparation for perpetual night.

Cut off from hope in early day

From power and glory cut away

But it is doomed and morning’s light

Must image forth the scowl of night

And childhood’s flower must waste its bloom

Beneath the shadow of the tomb (42)

The poem ‘At Castle Wood’ again focusses on the early stilling of emotional life attendant upon a sorrowful upbringing, when ‘[…] I was bred the mate of care/ The foster child of [sore] distress’: ‘The heart is dead since infancy’ (155). The protagonist in ‘H. A. and A. S.’ comments of ‘mortal grief’ that it ‘never heals with years’ (139); Gezari’s notes compare Brontë’s lines ‘For Time and Death and Mortal pain/ Give wounds that will not heal again’ (268, quoting 132). The following lines appear in a ‘Song’ dated 1844.

I ween, that when the grave’s dark wall

Did first her form retain;

They thought their hearts could ne’er recall

The light of joy again. (11)

The emphasis on unhealing grief is distinctively Brontë’s. In her landmark study of Brontë’s poems, Last Things, Gezari observes that ‘[u]nlike the speakers of the English elegies [Peter] Sacks studies’, the speaker in Brontë’s ‘Remembrance’ ‘does not turn away from death and toward life after a circumscribed period set aside for grieving’, and instead ‘asks whether such a turning is possible’ (Gezari: 53). That poem points towards an awareness that ‘finality and composure in the face of deep and irrevocable loss are unattainable’ (44). Likewise in Wuthering Heights Brontë represents, with the indivisible pair Catherine and Heathcliff, ‘an unresolved and inconclusive melancholy mourning’ (114).

At this point, however, we need to think about ‘For him who struck thy foreign string’, a poem dated 1838 which was published by Charlotte Brontë in 1850 under her title ‘The Lady to Her Guitar’:

For him who struck thy foreign string

I ween this heart hath ceased to care

Then why dost thou such feelings bring

To my sad spirit, old guitar?

 

It is as if the warm sunlight

In some deep glen should lingering stay

When clouds of tempest and of night

Had wrapped the parent orb away –

 

It is as if the glassy brook

Should image still its willows fair

Though years ago the woodman’s stroke

Laid low in dust their gleaming hair:

 

Even so, guitar, thy magic tone

Hath moved the tear and waked the sigh

Hath bid the ancient torrent flow

Although its very source is dry! (78)

The loss of the loved one, or alienation of the love object from the poem’s speaker, has inhibited the speaker’s emotional life seemingly absolutely: at ‘its very source’. As Gezari writes, this poem finds Emily Brontë ‘again creating a world without end where effects outlast their causes so that whatever was persists in a timeless present’. This visionary poem of unresolved mourning, Gezari notes, ‘shares Kubla Khan’s imagery of sunny spots enclosed by antique forests’ along with ‘shapes hovering on a watery surface’ (Gezari: 23). Yet in its resemblance too to the restorative natural sanctuary of the first poem published in Charlotte Brontë’s 1850 edition of her sister’s poems, ‘A little while, a little while’, the environment of the second stanza already suggests a less sorrowful kind of timelessness or persistence than that which we have tended to find in the poems. Here is how nature holds its light and lightens the speaker’s mood in the third and sixth stanzas of ‘A little while, a little while’:

There is a spot, ‘mid barren hills,

Where winter howls, and driving rain;

But, if the dreary tempest chills,

There is a light that warms again.

[…]

Still – as I mused – the naked room,

The alien firelight died away;

And from the midst of cheerless gloom,

I passed to bright, unclouded day. (Brontë: 203)

 

A closer look at Brontë’s poetic vocabulary further develops our awareness of how, as C. Day Lewis put it in a 1965 essay, the ‘struggle of the soul against predestined doom is one form which the freedom motif takes in Emily Brontë’s work’. In her textual notes Gezari observes that in ‘For him who struck thy foreign string’, Brontë’s use of the rare archaic verb ‘ween’, meaning ‘think’ or ‘surmise’, in the first stanza, recalls her other use of the word in the 1844 ‘Song’ already quoted (251). In the ‘Song’, ‘ween’ questions the absolute nature of the bereaved ones’ sorrow: the speaker only surmises that they thought themselves incapable of remembering joy. Similarly, ‘ween’ in ‘For him who struck thy foreign string’ leads us to wonder, already immediately at the beginning of the poem, whether the speaker’s heart actually has ‘ceased to care’ for the guitarist, and whether the speaker’s emotional life really is absolutely inhibited. In the second stanza the use of ‘wrapped’, meaning only ‘concealed’ or ‘absorbed’ (251, 242), undermines the finality of the loss of the ‘parent orb’.

It is also worth considering the final stanza of the poem, which appears to present music, or the guitarist’s musical imagination, as enabling the rebirth of the speaker’s emotional life. In her discussion of the vital principle affirmed by Brontë in ‘No coward soul is mine’ – the principle which ‘Pervades and broods above,/ Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears’ (182) – Gezari argues that Brontë there ‘uses the vocabulary Coleridge had used to describe the secondary imagination’ in his Biographia Literaria :

It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. [Gezari: 131, quoting Coleridge]

The key distinction between Coleridge’s language and Brontë’s, as Gezari notes, is Brontë’s substitution of ‘creates’ for ‘recreate’. ‘In Brontë’s poetic universe, living forms may be newly created, not just recreated as in Coleridge’s.’ (132) It seems to me that this statement applies too to the final stanza of ‘For him who struck thy foreign string’, in which the speaker’s emotional life, even when its ‘very source’ is presently ‘dry’ (just like Coleridge’s ‘essentially fixed and dead’ objects), can in actuality be newly created – not just reborn – by the influence of the guitarist’s musical imagination.

Texts

Emily Jane Brontë, The Complete Poems, ed. by Janet Gezari (London: Penguin, 1992)

Janet Gezari, Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems (Oxford: OUP, 2007)

Nature in Simon Jarvis’s ‘Jerusalem Deleted’

One notable element of the critique of present-day life held within Simon Jarvis’s most recent long philosophical poem, this year’s Jerusalem Deleted, is its commentary on our ongoing global processes of technicization. Jarvis worries at technology’s rapidly developing encroachments on our spiritual humanity – ‘so that no subtlety might tell apart/ the soul from silicon’ (16) – but he also finds a feature of our diminishing humanity to be its conversion of technology itself into a false nature, or a literalization of the Marxist concept of second nature: the digital data ‘cloud’. Here is how stanza 144 closes:

[…] that enumerating nihilation

which would suck England’s binaries as cinders

145

into the sand bank, to the pixel cloud,

its unlocatable undying shroud! (35)

In reaction to today’s presentation of technology as false nature, and our concomitant ‘total prospect of life’s set demise’, Jerusalem Deleted goes on to propose nature – and indeed an equivalently radicalized, totalized, ‘stark’ nature – as a refuge from technocratic society.

[…] I must

find Khoda, if he were alive: his tents

would be in some stark desert where the dust

refused the network by one too intense

343

heat, cold or damp; where rolling stock will rust

or wireless signals baffle at the blank,

cash not pass current at the labour bank. (68)

Of course Khoda’s speculated desert home itself reinforces the poem’s sense that we are now, with Sebald, ‘after Nature’ (89). The poem’s English landscape, haunted as it is by ‘avid drones’, is really technicized anti-nature.

Each single feature of the suffering earth

respired with malice, since there was no nature

not intermingled with the toys of dearth

interinsinuated in each feature

203

and calculating how each little birth

might bring some profit to the counter-creature

whose rage-surveillances would coldly sleep

inside each secret I might think to keep (44-45)

The next lines state how ‘yet rain still felt like rain’ and wonder if plant-life might in fact ‘have the temerity still to exist’, but one hundred pages further on, Jarvis reinforces the suggestion that it is precisely technology’s interinsinuation or pixellation of nature with harm – even if that nature still breathes – which points to the total quality of the threat posed by technocracy.

The whole East Midlands, this large wilderness

of BACKBONE sentinels and parcelled lots,

840

is network-ready, and the signals bless

its unloved shoulders with the coldest dots

falling just anywhere upon its curves,

deeply indifferent to the land’s slow swerves. (151)

The indifference or absence of affect of the digital invasion (or rape) of the East Midlands exemplifies the way in which this poetic environment is constituted by lack, dearth: here the landscape is punctured by cold pixels just as the narcoleptic consciousness of the narrator is shaped throughout the poem by naps and blackouts. Sensual deficiency, experienced by ‘unloved’ nature, transfers to the narrator in his alienation from nature. He blames his distance from natural sensuality on a seduction by philosophico-cultural practices, Versuche which can only self-disable in their own alienation from their natural origins.

By which cruel logic might I once forget

367

the smell, the tremor, of the breathing earth?

What subtle spectre, loved as soon as met,

bound me in service to persisting dearth?

Truth’s own researches, whose endeavours yet

reseal the passageways of words’ first birth? (72)

Later in the text, the narrator returns to his fear that an alienated form of cultural production dominates and violates nature’s sensual charge.

Have I so dined upon the fatal tree

1065

that I must never feel again the touch

of one light breath upon my face, or see

one lit field rained on, but I write it such

that every little part of it be me

killed by a letter which I still too much

1066

print even on the very face of nature,

stamp on the eyelid of each living creature? (188)

The awareness that culture can be grounded in domination of nature, has already brought the narrator to seek to avoid appearing to engage in the cultural work of trawling ‘grains of created sense’ from out of pained natural substance, or ‘suffering chaff’; sacralized language (‘divinest truth’) is seen to be itself a material epiphenomenon – a sort of discarded husk – of honed literary style.

It is just that I would not seem to sift

grains of created sense from unbegotten

380

or suffering chaff, the flesh-encyphered gift

divinest truth knows as its ownmost rotten

corpse of style’s contours, which descend to hell

in order to find out what writing well

lives off and sucks its tunes from. (74)

Elsewhere ‘style’s contours’ are identified as the sort of ‘superficial charm’ which is to be avoided along with a form of writing which violates the salvific content of natural sounds – their immediate revelation of ‘life, joy and sentience’.

Must I not any longer have a word

which might relinquish superficial charm

or name inviolately one sound heard

1064

sent by the verbless breeze across the farm

from whose weak bleat were instantly inferred

life, joy and sentience, before mistrust

could lay these creatures of the air in dust? (188)

Jarvis is wary of reducing nature to a figure of illusory freedom, such as when the idea of natural ‘freedom’ is turned to bolster a false escape from the regime of the capitalist work ethic.

[…] from the beeches dark

branches shade arrows, superseded toasts

to abstract freedom, a vacation lark

wandered through marked paths in a seeming Freiheit

1284

dying each instant to receding Freizeit. (225)

Yet nonetheless the narrator fantasizes nature as a refuge holding transcendental content, such as the dance of the lamb.

I dreamt the sharp owl was my kindest neighbour

or beech trees knew an aperture where grace

outlined them quickest, & the lamb call tabor

to let its skipping reconvoke a place

touched with a grain or supernatural trace (156)

Jerusalem Deleted  indeed expresses faith in ‘unforced intimations’ of a ‘core of unsummarizably intense/ epiphany, some promise of release’ (74), and in the potential of revelation: ‘Struck down with blessings by the total gift/ I just subsist in its illumination.’ (201) This sort of recognition of immediate salvific moments in Jarvis’s poetry may surprise – Jarvis having argued Hegelianly, in a 1991 article, that J.H. Prynne’s poetic resists the presentation of phenomenological immediacy because such a presentation would be undialectical: ‘once examined, apparent immediacy necessarily reveals its own mediatedness’. However, in his Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, after quoting Hegel’s Science of Logic on ‘being which has been restored, but as the infinite mediation and negativity of being in itself’, so as to underline the ‘crucial factor’ for Hegel that ‘the apparently immediate is actually mediated, “reflected in itself”‘, Andrew Bowie goes on to note the work of other philosophers whose questionings of Hegel can be said to anticipate Jarvis’s approach to immediacy now in Jerusalem Deleted :

Dieter Henrich shows the problem with this conception [Hegel’s] in a seminal essay on ‘Hegel’s Logic of Reflection’ […]. Henrich thinks that the problem can be overcome in Hegelian terms; Manfred Frank shows how this problem had already been identified by Schelling, and how a Hegelian solution to it is impossible […]. (Bowie: 168)

The Hegel-Schelling debate relates to Jarvis’s concern in the philosophical verse of Jerusalem Deleted with a ‘total gift’ and the ‘unsummarizably intense’, or with the transcendentally immediate (or immediately transcendental), because – as Bowie maintains – the ‘real question’ at issue between Schelling and Hegel ‘in the years following 1801’, is ‘how this Absolute can be presented in philosophy’. Indeed for Bowie ‘the future of modern philosophy lies in the implications of this conflict’. (84) ‘The issue between Schelling and Hegel’, Bowie noted, will centre on ‘whether the Absolute can, as Hegel thinks, be grasped by the process of reflection, thus requiring no presupposition external to reflection’; already in his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 Schelling had argued against Hegel with his view that – as Bowie puts it – ‘the role of the work of art was precisely to give access to the ground [emph. mine] of reflection’, which ground ‘must be presupposed, but cannot appear in reflection’ (56). Schelling’s foregrounding of a concern with the ground of reflection – with art or nature – entails, or is instinct with the denial of the need to follow the logic of reflection and reveal mediatedness which Bowie refers to thus:

Schelling’s Absolute, as presented in his identity philosophy, has come to be associated with ‘immediacy’, the failure to carry out the ‘exertion of the concept’, the articulation of the moments of the process of the Absolute, which is regarded as Hegel’s great achievement, begun in the Phenomenology and best exemplified in the Logic and the Encyclopaedia. (55)

The philosophical landscape of Jerusalem Deleted shares with Schelling’s thinking the view that nature offers an immediately presupposed Absolute, as when it lets the skipping of the lamb ‘reconvoke a place/ touched with a grain or supernatural trace’ (Jarvis: 156). Jarvis’s narrator is also familiar with ‘the very grammar of the way I flee/ the labour of the concept’ (197). Rather than following the logic of reflection towards the goal of an Absolute which is judged to be realizable in philosophy, here the poem’s narrator, with Schelling, questions what Bowie calls ‘the last great attempt at positive metaphysics: that of Hegel’ (Bowie: 140). The narrator instead directs the thinking of the poem towards Schelling’s ‘basic move against Idealism’ (Bowie) in which, through its foregrounding of a concern with the ground of reflection, ‘the primacy of the subject is undermined by the realization of the dependence of its thinking on what is itself not the result of thinking’ (133). His focus on nature or pre-reflexive being thus led Schelling to ‘a structure that has again become familiar in recent European philosophy, the structure of the inherent lack in the subject, whose very nature is determined by this lack’. (140)

We have noted already the importance of the subject’s lack within Jerusalem Deleted, but to try to understand both nature and inherent lack in Jarvis’s poem a little more, it is helpful to draw on how Bowie notes ‘the proximity of pre-reflexive being to Lacan’s Real’. Quoting the other Bowie (Malcolm) on how the Real is ‘the irremediable and intractable “outside” of language; the indefinitely receding goal towards which the signifying chain tends’, Bowie argues that this goal is akin to pre-reflexive being or nature, ‘the goal of what Schelling terms “negative philosophy”‘, insofar as ‘the Real is actually always already lost as that from which the subject emerges’ (140). This alliance of nature, pre-reflexive being and the always already lost with the Lacanian Real, re-emerges within stanza 1145 of Jarvis’s poem, where the Real is found in ‘the wheel/ of needs & wants’. Unfreedom, pain and social ‘misery’ are held to be the precise locations of this structure of lack:

False personations which withhold their pardon

vanish like History : a true help sought

acquires from open misery this Real

perennially turning in the wheel

of needs & wants whose futures are the names

1146

of work’s hot logic, play’s repeated games. (Jarvis: 202)

These lines observe that the subject lacks the Real and only works and plays, self-constitutes, because in its unfreedom it ‘needs & wants’ the Real. Yet whilst for (Malcolm Bowie’s) Lacan the Real remains only an ‘indefinitely receding goal’, for Jarvis ‘a true help sought/ acquires from open misery this Real’. By contrast, hyper-singularized selves who can only blame social unfreedom whilst judging it alien to their own realms of personal freedom – perhaps Jarvis is thinking here of the infantile ‘progressive’ perfectibilism of much Left politics – are seen to remain frozen in their illusory freedoms: ‘False personations which withhold their pardon/ vanish like History’. The immediately preceding stanzas, with their reference to the black hole-like ‘centripetal force/ perfecting singularity’, and reminders that ‘Life is that secret known to everyone’ and ‘lips [must] meet live lips before the gone hearts harden’ (201), prepare us for this sense that that (curative ‘secret’) which we lack, ‘this Real’, can be accessed through the ‘true’ seeking carried out by a nonjudgmental self engaged in a shared recognition of pain – in ‘open misery’.

[…] I affirm salvation

not as the freedom tree but when my neighbour

remembers with me the unfree one here

where the lost apple blossoms into pain. (69)

Stanzas 47-48 of Jerusalem Deleted explicitly define this salvific project of a shared recognition of suffering in terms of a poetic involving the negative expression of hope:

The true solution felt as though it hung

the longest little infinite away

from where it might as readily be sung

48

as typed or spoken, and the massive grey

harbour those timbres, hues and serifs which

should make this open misery a rich

path of negations to a common joy. (19)

The narrator’s programme of working through the pain entailed by an unfree society – ‘Again I dedicate myself to pain’ (152) – seems to bring him to identify with a tradition of suffering poets: in stanza 450 the remark ‘I had to get to Harlow’ and the reference to ‘a Hertfordshire no thought might fathom’ (86) seems to invoke John Clare’s ‘Journey Out of Essex’. There is certainly a faith in a salvific obscure reception of the poetry of the suffering:

[…] press on through hell as though

there were some saving element within it,

a small band in the shaw, a troop hid low,

23

a strong secreted or unknown platoon

reading the faint scripts underneath the moon. (14-15)

It seems unlikely that this ‘saving element’, which would be prepared to receive a redemptive poetic recognizing unfreedom, would be located by this poem’s narrator in Cambridge: he classes Khertvis (the town that represents Cambridge in the poem, I believe) amongst ‘those dead sees gone/ some twenty years since into blank oblivion’ (19). Nor would the narrator see Cambridge producing such a poetic. Near the poem’s close, the sort of hyper-cultured avant-garde poetry that is typically associated with ‘Cambridge School’ production is suddenly inveighed against, by an italicized voice irrupting into the narrator’s monologue, as ‘”well-fed and agonized and stranded high,/ “a papier-mâché grimace in the sky!” ‘ (241) The implication is that the élite sort of writing represents not ‘open misery’ but instead the closed-off misery of false personations. The narrator welcomes this rebellion of unfunded lyric against the salaried poetic élite, going on to define it in terms of the very redemptive form that the entire poem’s title has refused. ‘JERUSALEM: inauditible loop/ sung for no supper!’ (242) A new poetic with the salvific ambitions of Blake’s Jerusalem is sensed to involve the construction of an indefinitely receding goal à la the Lacanian Real, or a work of Schellingian negative philosophy.

Jarvis’s poem ends with the appearance of a female poet whose discourse spins, like the Real, in ‘the wheel/ of needs & wants’. If for (Malcolm Bowie’s) Lacan the Real remains only an ‘indefinitely receding goal’, this poet’s natural discourse represents a poetic that organically re-articulates the pain of ‘the lost apple’. It is a redemptive poetic enacting the sort of sensitive immanent critique of social unfreedom which can help pain regenerate itself from within.

[…] I can hear her talk

still ineradicably spin and shed

leaf upon leaf of melody all whose

1394

notes are those names and concepts I have struck

out from this island’s face, as though her luck

were, with her song, to touch each wound, so soft

as it, transfigured in its pain, should cross

into its true shape. […] (243)

Non-linked texts

Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993)

Simon Jarvis, Jerusalem Deleted (London: Enitharmon Press, 2015)