Emily Bronte's poetry
Emily Bronte, 'Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee'
Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee
Shall Nature cease to bow?
Thy mind is ever moving
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving—
Come back and dwell with me.
I know my mountain breezes
Enchant and soothe thee still—
I know my sunshine pleases
Despite thy wayward will.
When day with evening blending
Sinks from the summer sky,
I’ve seen thy spirit bending
In fond idolatry.
I’ve watched thee every hour;
I know my mighty sway,
I know my magic power
To drive thy griefs away.
Few hearts to mortals given
On earth so wildly pine;
Yet none would ask a heaven
More like this earth than thine.
Then let my winds caress thee;
Thy comrade let me be—
Since nought beside can bless thee,
Return and dwell with me.
What we love about this poem...
Usually the subject or theme of a nature poem is nature itself, with a person admiring its beauty or describing its power; here, Nature is the speaker, addressing a person.
About the author
Emily Bronte (1818-1848) lived just 30 years, her life cut short by consumption, as were those of many of her family members. Though she is most famous for her novel Wuthering Heights, Bronte was also a gifted poet.
To read alongside...
Richard Jefferies was an English writer who helped to pioneer the genre of 'nature writing.' He was born in the year that Bronte died. His works marvel at the richness and diversity of rural habitats and draw the reader's attention to tiny details of nature in an accessible way. Jefferies's contemporary, the novelist Thomas Hardy, put nature in the foreground of his fiction, as in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Return of the Native, as well as devoting most of his poetry to it.
There's a way in which Nature functions as a character in the writings of the American author Henry David Thoreau, who is best known for Walden, his account of living alone and self-sufficiently in nature.
Staying with American literature: Susan Glaspell's play Inheritors situates the land as a living, breathing, sentient presence; the characters who understand this fare better than those who treat the earth merely as a resource to be exploited. In the opening of Willa Cather's novel Death Comes For the Archbishop, “hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over.” And the books of Edward Abbey feature Nature prominently, especially his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which a group of environmentalist activists sabotages the building of a controversial dam in the Southwest (it's still there, and it helped to create the artificial Lake Powell, which flooded and thus obscured from view the beautiful Glen Canyon).
Finally, it's worth mentioning how prominently trees feature as characters in works of literature, from Hans Christian Andersen's short story 'The Pine Tree' (Christmas told from the point of view of the poor tree) to Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree to Richard Powers's novel The Overstory to Sue Burke's science-fiction novel Semiosis, which features a giant, multi-colored bamboo plant called Stevland whose subterranean root network stretches for miles and who learns to communicate with, and eventually dominate, the human characters around him. He gives new meaning to the word 'creepy'!
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