Emily Bronte's poetry is perhaps the most well regarded of all the Brontes. In her stanzas (below), early signs of the writer's prose style shines through. It's fun to pick out bits of the Ellis Bell of Wuthering Heights within the text. "I'll walk where my own nature would be leading-
It vexes me to choose another guide-". How very pre-Linton Catherine of her, no?
"Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:
Today, I will seek not the shadowy region:
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.
I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long past history.
I'll walk where my own nature would be leading-
It vexes me to choose another guide-
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding
Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside.
What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both worlds of heaven and hell
-Emily Bronte, 1850
