Bronte Poems

The Poems of Charlotte Bronte and Patrick Branwell Bronte : The Poems of Emily Jane Brontë and Anne Brontë. Edited by T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington. (Basil ElackwelL £1 5s.) THESE two volumes of poems by Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Bronte are models of editing and production.

The prefaces and notes provide all needful information as to the poems themselves ; they give correct attributions as to authorship, clearing up, once and for all, many doubtful points ; when corrections and alterations have been made in the text, the editors have used the original manuscripts whenever they could be consulted, and the whole material is handled with dry scientific accuracy without comment or criticism. There is included also a very interesting facsimile of a manuscript notebook, such as the sisters used, of Emily's poems, in which are many that appeared in the joint volume by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell published in 1846. These poems are mostly dated in Emily's hand and the latest recorded date is January 2nd, 1846. At that time the sisters' manuscripts had not yet gone to the printer, and it may easily be that this was the identical notebook which Charlotte cfscovered ' in the autumn of 1845 and which inspired her with the idea of bringing out the joint volume. The only omission in guidance is that we are not told what poems of Anne formed her contribution to this volume, and it is possible to regret that Branwell's translation of the first book of Horace's Odes is not included. That Charlotte did not ask him to contribute to the 1846 volume is perhaps attributable to the fact that she avoided any possible contact with him, rather than that she had ceased to take any interest merely in his literary work.

We have here all the poems that Charlotte is at present known to have written ; these include twenty-eight new ones. We cannot help asking ourselves whether she had any real gift for poetry. Would a single poem of hers have survived, or at any rate have been republished today, if she had not written Jane Eyre or V illette, and if she had not been a member of that tragic family which, psychologically, interests us so much that we welcome any addition to our knowledge of its days and its works ? Prose was her real vehicle for expressing emotion and "getting it across," and when she treats the same subject in prose and verse the difference between the two is extraordinary : one was natural to her, the other artificial. For instance, the death of Emily inspired her with these lines in verse :

"My darling, thou wilt never know The grinding agony of woe That we have borne for thee. Thus may we consolation tear E'en from the depth of our despair And wasting misery."

Compare with that :

"Never in her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly, she made haste to leave us. . . . Day by day when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of love and wonder."

Often her verse is scarcely distinguishable from Anne's, of which she said that it" had the merit of truth and simplicity ": and, as we know, she considered that Emily's contribution to the joint volume contained all that was of value in the book.

Or contrast Emily and Anne when each addresses a Blue- bell : there is no need to assign authorship. One says :

"Sacred watcher, wave thy bells ! Fair hill flower and woodland child, Dear to me in deep green dells Dearest on the mountains wild."

The other :

"There is a afloat eloquence

In every wild blue-bell, That fills my softened heart with bliss That words could never tell."

We pass to Emily and Branwell. New information about the Brontës is apt to be highly disconcerting to some partisan section of Bronteites, and to those who have always vehem- ently believed that Emily, both in prose and poetry, was the supreme genius of the family, out of sight of the others, and that the execrable Branwell was as incapable of writing either as he was of keeping sober, it will be a shock to find

that many of her poems which they so justly venerated were his. Messrs. Short,er's and Hadfield's edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë may have forewarned some of them ; the rest must resign themselves to bear the blow.

Among such poems is that piece of mystical psychology, "My Ancient ship upon my Ancient Sea," which is a poetical version of his own prose story in the Angrian Saga : "Sleep, Mourner, Sleep," justly held to be typical of Emily's genius is his : " Memory " is his : his, too, is the poem beginning "Well, I will lift my eyes once more," out of which five stanzas used to be assigned to Emily, and there are others.

These new attributions are proved : there is no doubt about them, and we must accept the conclusion that Branwell,

the drunken writer of nothing but doggerel, so resembled Emily in lyrical fire that accomplished critics accepted his work as hers. In those three years from 1845 to 1848 when the whole family was together at Haworth, when Charlotte

could scarcely bring herself to speak to her brother, and Anne used him as her model for the tipsy monomaniac in The

Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily and Branwell drew close to each other in the essential and intimate affinity to which their poems testify. She burned with the fire of pure genius white and unwavering, and in those gleams that shot through the dismal smoke of his disordered mind there was flame more akin in quality to hers than we can fmd in the immense talents of one of her sisters and the gentle piety of the other.

E. F. BENSON.