All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee - angst, heartbreak, and repetitive V sounds in Emily Brontë

A post or two ago, I looked at a poem written by Emily Brontë when she was 19 years old, and mentioned that to me it seemed much more mature. Biblibio politely suggested that it seemed plenty immature, detecting "teenage angst." I was actually thinking about her versification, not the content of what she wrote. Biblibio was committing the readerly sin of responding to what I actually wrote, rather than what I meant, but did not write. Unforgivable!

Biblibio is correct, completely correct. And it's not just Brontë's teenage poems that are packed with adolescent pity and passion; it's the whole project. That's why Les Hauts de Hurlevant is suddenly so popular with vampires and the teenage French girls who love them. Let's look at a poem Brontë wrote when she was 27, published a year later with her sisters' verse in the Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell volume. I'll interrupt it here and there, since the main point of Wuthering Expectations is to mangle the work of geniuses:

Remembrance

Cold in the earth--and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far, removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?

Now here, note all of the repetitions of entire words, rather than vowel and consonant sounds, although there's also plenty of that (above, remove, grave, have, love, sever, wave). Also note, that the speaker's tone is hysterical and the sense on a far edge of recognizable human emotion.

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover
Thy noble heart for ever, ever more?

Those internal "v"s, they're everywhere. And look at all of those "o"s. The answer to the question is "No," as we will see below. Her thoughts, in fact, do not still hover over the mountains containing her lover's grave, and do not rest on the grave. I guess they used to hover until they were tired, and then rest. I'll skip two stanzas.

No later light has lightened up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.

But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy;
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.

Then did I check the tears of useless passion--
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?

Ah ha, a twist. She has Moved On. The poem is an argument against teenage angst, expressed in the rhetoric of teenage angst! She checks the tears of useless passion, shes dares not indulge in her memories. Their power is acknowledged, but also their danger.

"Remembrance" has attracted a lot of attention from heavy-hitting critics. I'm looking at the note to the poem in the Penguin Classics edition, p. 228, where I see that Barbara Hardy called it Brontë's "best love poem," and F. R. Leavis wrote that it was "the finest poem in the nineteenth-century part of The Oxford Book of English Verse," and (or but?) it "does unmistakably demand to be read in a plangent declamation." Try that at home. I'm pretty sure it will emphasize the more ridiculous side of the poem, rather than the affecting side. Maybe my declamations have not been sufficiently plangent. I'll keep practicing.

George Eliot, Adam Bede and pregnant reflections on vital continuity in art

George Eliot is at the "centre," F. R. Leavis tells me, in a Foreword included in the Signet Classics edition of Adam Bede, "of the creative achievement of the English language," and she "incites to pregnant reflections on vital continuity in art." What can this mean? Leavis wants to put Eliot in the middle of a literary tradition - Scott, Hawthorne, Eliot, James, Hardy, Lawrence. One leads to the next.

I had never read any Eliot before taking on Adam Bede this summer. That list reminds me why. I had already picked up Leavis's idea from somewhere. Right, Hardy (ugh) and Lawrence (ugh, ugh)*. George Eliot was a proponent of Big Ideas, writing philosophical essays disguised as novels. Like Dostoevsky, or (shudder) Thomas Mann.

Up against this tradition, I set Gustave Flaubert and his aesthete descendants, as does Leavis, interestingly enough. Madame Bovary was published three years before Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel, so she had no excuse for not writing a perfectly polished, elegant, and possibly hollow novel. Flaubert had shown the way. Come on, George Eliot, if that is your real name, get with the new thing.

I express these opinions in imperfect ignorance, so no need to seriously argue with me - "you don't know what you're talking about" is sufficient to defeat me.

Prof. Novel Reading was able to cajole the critbloggers at The Valve into hosting a long reading of Adam Bede this summer. Although I was unable to play along much, I owe them credit for, at the least, encouraging me to read the darn thing. This week, a few notes about what I found. No, it's not Flaubert, and why would I want it to be.

* No objections, enthusiasm, even, for Hardy's poetry and a number of Lawrence's short stories.