Emily Bronte – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Emily Brontë’s ‘Hope’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Hope’ is a short poem by Emily Brontë (1818-48); a poem we thought worth sharing at this time. In this poem, the author of Wuthering Heights personifies Hope, but here she is a false friend, who only seems to be interested in being with the poet if her ‘fate’ is a good one. Unlike Keats’s poem about hope, then, Emily Brontë reflects the idea that hope is so hard to find when we are at our lowest ebb, and this is precisely when we most need it.

A Short Analysis of Emily Bronte’s ‘To a Wreath of Snow’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘To a Wreath of Snow’ shows Emily Brontë (1818-48), some ten years before the publication of her sole novel Wuthering Heights (1847). Written when she was still a teenager, ‘To a Wreath of Snow’ deserves some words of analysis to illuminate the language and imagery Brontë so deftly uses in what might be described as a late Romantic poem.

A Summary and Analysis of Emily Bronte’s ‘Remembrance’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Remembrance’ is one of Emily Brontë’s best-known poems. F. R. Leavis, not a critic who was ever easy to please, described it as ‘the finest poem in the nineteenth-century part of The Oxford Book of English Verse’, although he also believed it lacked the felt experience found, for instance, in Thomas Hardy’s poetry and referred to it as an ‘imaginative exercise’.

A Short Analysis of Emily Brontë’s ‘Love and Friendship’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

When she died in 1848, aged just 30, Emily Brontë had written just one novel, Wuthering Heights. Of course, that novel was a classic and remains one of the most popular and widely read Victorian novels. But Emily Brontë also wrote many poems. ‘Love and Friendship’ sees Emily Brontë reflecting on the differences between these two pillars of our emotional lives.

Love is like the wild rose-briar,
Friendship like the holly-tree—
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
But which will bloom most constantly?

The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air;
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who will call the wild-briar fair?

A Short Analysis of Emily Bronte’s ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

When Poems of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published in 1846, it initially sold just two copies. The authors of the poems, better known as Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, had published the volume in the hope of raising some much-needed cash, but it was not to be. Copies were sent to established poets, including William Wordsworth, but none of them wrote back to the then unknown Brontë siblings.

Included in the volume was the following poem by Emily Brontë (1818-1848), best known for her novel Wuthering Heights but also a gifted poet. ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’ wonderfully showcases Emily’s dauntless and elemental spirit, as the following brief analysis is designed to show.