Emily Brontë's Lyrical Ballads

George Levine wrote of Darwin that he "spent his life discovering differences."¹ The discovery of differences and the subsequent wrestling with the destabilizing energies they bring into play may be said to be a defining preoccupation of Victorian thought as it manifested itself across an astonishing variety of cultural endeavors. Levine goes on to note Darwin's awe at little things: "pinhead-sized barnacles, and worms and bees and ants" (p. 245) that accompanied the sweep of his scientific imagining of the vast, inhuman process of natural selection. Emily Brontë's poetic imagination similarly changes scale, moving from cosmic visions to linnets, bees, and bluebells. Differences, the often-troubled borders between warring states of mind, of will, of desire, shape her poetry. Her language subtly blends visionary intensity with a powerful awareness of the significance of the ordinary fabric of day-to-day life. Reading the poems provokes a tantalizing sense that what they are obviously about is not what they are actually about: apparent simplicity breaks down very quickly under the pressure of the questions it raises. How do the poems generate such complex effects given the real sense of mystery that animates them? Many poems turn on the nature of a power they simultaneously invoke and question, adding an element of self-reflexivity that is augmented by the inscrutable connections they have to the Gondal saga and to Wuthering Heights, connections not explicitly addressed by Brontë herself. My essay constructs an account of the formal nature of the poems and explores the intertextual function of the ballad—particularly the Border ballad—as deployed by Brontë to extend the capacity of the post-Romantic lyric to perform a persistently enigmatic subjectivity. She draws together intensity and ambiguity, presence and abstraction, intimacy and unavailability in such a way as to prefigure many later forms of the Victorian lyric while, as Susan Stewart intimates, exploring "the eroticisation of boundary," an eroticization that is both visionary and violent: "visions rise and change which kill me with desire."²

The sense of difference from the run of the mill that the poems can generate was noted at the time of publication. A reviewer in the Athenaeum, quoted by Elizabeth Gaskell in The Life of Charlotte Bronte, observes that they "convey an impression of originality beyond what his contributions to these volumes embody."³ As the pronoun indicates, this review was written before the "Ellis Bell" mask was removed by Charlotte, an "unwarranted disclosure" that enraged Emily who, Charlotte belatedly realized, "will not endure to be alluded to under any appellation than the nom de plume."⁴ As with most biographical details relating to Emily, this one is open to a number of interpretations: that, for example, she needed the nom de plume to allow her to write about herself under cover and felt the exposure grievously, or that it served to indicate that the identity of Emily Brontë had no part to play in the poetry of Ellis Bell. Another early reader observes, "if [her] poems are read by themselves [that is, separately from Anne's and Charlotte's] . . . it will be seen that strength is their most remarkable characteristic."⁵ Charlotte saw them as "not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry woman generally write"; she felt seized by something "more than surprise": "I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating."⁶ Charlotte's response has more to do with gender than genre, yet the language she uses is also obliquely grounded in genre. Her appreciation of the subtle urgency of the address combined with a peculiar music, "wild" and "melancholy," can suggest ballads as much as a lyric intensity. The remarks in the introductory note to Graham Tomson's (Rosamund Marriott Watson) collection, Ballads of the North Countrie (1888) are helpful in drawing a distinction between ballads and lyrics as they were perceived in the late nineteenth century, a perspective that looks back on the cultural impact of the ballad revival: "The Ballads in this collection are, for the most part, English and...