GONDAL POEMS By Emily Bronte
This slender volume (Basil Blackwood, 5s.) contains some new and very welcome facts about Emily Bronte's poems and finally clears up some confused and doubtful points. Beginning in 1844, she wrote in a tiny note-book, now in the British Museum, forty-four poems entitled " Gondal Poems." They there- fore all belong to the secret Gondal Saga which she and Anne " played " together from the time they were young children till Emily's death. This note-book (not then complete) was doubtless one of two which Charlotte " discovered " in Emily's desk in 1845: this discovery was the direct origin of the joint volume pub- lished by the sisters the next year in which were incorporated some of these poems. More of them were published by Charlotte after Emily's death, but six of them are here printed for the first time in full, and we find that some stanzas of a poem here entitled " Julia M. and A. G. Rochelle " were published by Emily herself as " The Prisoner," and that Charlotte in i85o published .thers, calling them " The Visionary." Another point cleared up concerns " The Wanderer from the Fold," hitherto )elieved to be Emily's " in memoriam " .11 her brother Branwell, who died in
1848, three months before her own death. But as this poem here appears dated in her own hand 1844, this associa- tion is no longer tenable. Other more fantastically romantic conjectures must also vanish.
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