The Complete Poems

Poetry has always been a challenging form of literature for me, and I don't think that will ever change.

Some of the poems in this collection were truly brilliant,展现出了极高的艺术水准和深刻的思想内涵. However, there were a large number of them, and as a result, their quality varied.

Although I understand that this is to be expected in any comprehensive collection of works.

Overall, this is a must-read for fans of Bronte, especially those who were drawn to the darkness and intensity of Wuthering Heights.

The poems offer a unique perspective on Bronte's creative mind and allow readers to explore her literary world in a new and different way.

Whether you are a poetry lover or simply a fan of Bronte's work, this collection is sure to provide an interesting and engaging read.

Emily Bronte has an extraordinary charm that casts a powerful spell on her readers. She writes in a way that haunts, torments, agonises, and yet also inspires. In the realm of Gothic literature, she holds a most distinguished and designated place. She skillfully draws her readers into dark and enchanted forests, where one can easily envision falling in love, perhaps with the wrong person. Her poetry is filled with an echoing and creaking quality, influenced by a tender yet macabre touch and a mystical provocation.

However, what I didn't appreciate about this particular collection is the redundancy of her themes and even the language. As I reached about halfway through, I grew quite tired of the poetry. It almost seemed as if I was reading the same exact poem repeatedly, with only minor differences.

The lines "Yet could I with past pleasures
Past woe's oblivion buy,
That by the death of my dearest treasures
My deadliest pains might die,

O then another daybreak
Might haply dawn above,
Another summer gild my cheek
My soul, another love." illustrate both the beauty and the sameness that I experienced in her work. On one hand, the words are poignant and evoke strong emotions. On the other hand, the recurrence of similar themes and expressions made it a bit monotonous for me.

Despite this drawback, Emily Bronte's poetry still has its allure and continues to be studied and admired by many. Her unique style and the depth of her emotions are undeniable, even if the collection as a whole could have benefited from more variety.

Una absoluta maravilla, una joya. He disfrutado de principio a fin de los poemas de Emily. Sus poemas están cargados de intensidad, romanticismo y melancolía. He ido dosificando la lectura a lo largo de los meses. Qué pena que muriera tan joven y no tuviera tiempo de escribir mucho más.

Ligera la niebla sobre la colina. Mañana no habrá tormenta. No, el día ha llorado hasta la saciedad. Ha gastado sus reservas de dolor silencioso.

Oh, estoy de vuelta en los días de mi infancia. Soy una niña otra vez. Y a cubierto, bajo el techo de mi padre, junto a la vieja puerta del vestíbulo, miro caer esta tarde nubosa después de un día de lluvia. Nieblas azules, dulces nieblas de verano recubren la cadena montañosa del horizonte.

La humedad se extiende por la alta hierba verde. Espesa como las lágrimas de la mañana. Y pasan soñadoras bocanadas de fragancias que exhalaron otros años. Emily's poetry is truly a wonder, a precious gem. It has been a delight to read her works from beginning to end. The intensity, romanticism, and melancholy in her poems are captivating. I have been savoring the reading over the months. It is such a pity that she passed away so young and didn't have more time to write. The light mist over the hill gives a sense of tranquility. Tomorrow there will be no storm. The day has cried itself out and exhausted its reserves of silent pain. Oh, I am back in the days of my childhood. I am a little girl again. Hiding under my father's roof, beside the old vestibule door, I watch this cloudy afternoon after a rainy day. The blue mists, the sweet summer mists, cover the mountain range on the horizon. The humidity spreads over the tall green grass, as thick as the morning tears. And dreamy puffs of fragrances that were exhaled in other years pass by.

The poetic intensity of Emily is very interesting and wonderful to read. Especially when compared with "Wuthering Heights". Just like her novel, the weather accompanies a lot. It is better to read it in a storm than in the sun.

However, what impresses me the most is the way that a few words can tell you a fascinating story. I would have loved to read the poems related to the story that I believe she created together with her sister Anne, in chronological order. In order to have appreciated that world more.

For me, what was most difficult was the English. But it occurred to me that reading such old English with my basic English, it was torturous to try to read the poem at first glance.

Because by God, this English is so difficult, hahahaha.

If I could rate this one billion stars, I would without hesitation.

These poems are not just words on a page; they are incredibly precious to me. They have been my constant companions throughout both the bad times and the good, ever-present in my life like a warm embrace.

They have seen me through my lowest moments, providing solace and inspiration when I needed it most. And in the good times, they have added an extra layer of beauty and depth to my experiences.

There's not a lot I wouldn't do to somehow turn back time and rescue the rest of the Gondal work. It is like a lost treasure, and I long to have it all in my hands, to be able to fully explore and appreciate its wonder.

I can only imagine the stories and emotions that are hidden within those lost pages, and I am determined to do everything in my power to bring them back to light.

4 stars

Brontë's poems are a profound exploration of various mournful and despondent themes. However, surprisingly, reading them offers a sense of comfort. As we peruse her words, we come to realize that someone else has experienced the same pain that we feel. It makes us understand that we are not alone in our suffering; we are simply human.

Memory, in her works, is presented as both benign and harrowing. The question of what it means to remember past joys lingers. Does it console us by subduing "both grief and passion wild" through the remembrance of a happier time? Or does it, instead, only accentuate our present sorrow, as she writes, "if I awake a note / That gave me joy before / Sounds of sorrow from thee float / Changing evermore". The conflict that stems from our ability to remember is masterfully captured in her writing.

The notes of grief that resonate throughout her poetry do not incite despair. Instead, they make our loneliness feel a little less burdensome. Her poems describe how one can turn inward, how we can retreat into our own internal world and discover solace there. We have the power to be our own comforter, as she states, "Sure solacer of human cares, / And sweeter hope, when hope despairs."

Moreover, she infuses hope into her poems. The fear of death and loss plagues us all, but reading her words can temporarily ease that fear.

"Weep not, but think that I have past / Before thee o'er a sea of gloom / Have anchored safe and rest at last / Where tears and mourning cannot come."

Since I read the poems of Emily Brontë in this beautifully old Penguin Classics edition, I have developed a really really great love for poems. Already the German poets Goethe and Schiller could convince me with their numerous poems. Now I have also been able to discover the English or Victorian poets and lyricists for myself.

Emily Jane Brontë, the author of "Wuthering Heights", is one of the most talented female authors of the Victorian era and is无与伦比 for me. Her poems have now shown me this. They are perfect for autumn and the cold seasons - gloomy, creepy, mournful, melancholic and calming at the same time. I have enjoyed so much delving into Brontë's emotional world, have empathized and have completely immersed myself. Her poems can be read almost melodically and have made me feel all kinds of emotions. When reading, I had goosebumps. What her words and verses do to me and probably also to other readers is simply... wow! They have constantly accompanied me in my head, were constantly present and have often left me sleepless. Seldom have I felt something like this when reading words. This poetry collection has rekindled my love for reading, but not only for reading prose, but for reading everything that words can express. Read it! Read it if you are as in love with words and verses - if you want to immerse yourself and hear your inner voice a little louder. Even though the English language was a small challenge here, it is definitely worth dealing with it anyway!

A few months ago, I received a meme on Facebook, asking me to discuss my favorite books. That experience turned into a very dark and painful afternoon of pondering books. Books are far too much like friends for my relationships with them to be overly healthy - God knows I mistreat my friends. But in that meme, I wrote about Emily Dickinson, about how difficult it is to separate the woman from the poetry. I have this kind of purist mindset that tells me that's a sign of weakness, that I'm conflating good writing with a good backstory. However, reading isn't a numbers game, and as Dead Poet Society puts it, poetry isn't American Bandstand. Honestly (Mr. Barca), I think that's why I don't like putting ratings on books (the recent foray into it on Goodreads has already felt traumatic). I mean, I could rate how good my friends are too, with a star system, but in essence, I'm not rating my friends, I'm rating their friendship to me, aren't I? And if books or friends are to be judged by how well they can maintain good relations with me, then... well, I wouldn't wish that standard on anyone. I feel cruel rating a book because I'm passing a judgment on the book that has more to do with me than the book (The Lair of the White Worm being excluded from that sentence...). Imagine for a moment that everyone on earth was given the value their mother attached to them... how unfair would that be? How meaningless? Why put on a star if it means nothing? The only reason to put a star on is because it means something, and if it means something, it means something I don't feel good expressing.

Emily Bronte suffers from this "disease" in my mind - I do not love Wuthering Heights, I love Emily Bronte, and thereby love her children (which isn't to say I wouldn't love Wuthering Heights if it were by someone else...). When I read Wuthering Heights, I'm not on the moors with Heathcliff, I'm very small, and in a little parsonage, looking out on a storm with my dear one, Emily, who's murmuring out this story to me (Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, is sitting very quietly in her garden and letting me read a little slip of paper she's taken from the pocket of her apron. I'm embarrassed and awed, she is calm). There is something intensely personal in the writing of my favorite authors, a feeling that makes me feel that I have a friend who is much wiser and greater than I am.

If reading Wuthering Heights then makes one feel as if they are a Bronte, reading this book is like constructing your childhood in reverse, starting with the evening listening to your sister read to you just before she died, and falling backwards through all the years of having her for a sister, "remembering" who she was, how she grew, remembering the little corners of the mind that you only know in your siblings, remembering the experience of realizing that someone you love has a spark of the divine in them. When the title of this book says "complete", it means it - this is not the collection of all the poems that have been published. This is more like reading through your sister's old notebooks - everything is here, the half-finished scraps, the hammered-out perfected poems, the things she never meant for you to read. Everything.

My favorite aspect (short of the sheer enormity of gorgeousness in Emily's writing) was the presence of the Gondal poems, along with an excellent introduction explaining them. The Bronte sisters spent the greater part of their lives writing prose, maps, plays, and poetry that related to a shared paracosm - at first one that all the siblings shared, called the Great Glass City, and after Charlotte went to school, a separate world that better suited the inclinations of Emily and Anne, called Gondal. In Gondal, the two sisters constructed a vast, sprawling, and utterly incomplete epic, surrounding the life of a beautiful, tragic, strong-willed woman and her love affairs through a period of war, strife, and decay in Gondal. The poems have little in the way of plot - most are meant to be more lyric than narrative - but there was a soul in these characters (each recurring frequently) that spoke of deep, long work and love, and of a soul that sought an escape into the imaginative landscape of her own creation, much like I'm seeking an escape into the imaginative landscape of her relics. This feeling of double immersion - into the imagination of my imagined imagination, as it were - was dizzying, thrilling. Liberating, I guess, in a weird way. To imagine as someone else, for just a few minutes, is both revealing and ecstatically anonymous. Suddenly all the strange thoughts and terrible secret selves are on someone else's stage, all the churn and bustle of internal life can manifest without the interference of the mind, because it's not your mind anyway - it's someone else's.

Emily Bronte truly had "no coward soul" - her poems are the poems of a secret self forever diving deeper and deeper into itself, forever plucking from the deep lightless pools of selfness the pearls that are such a risk to draw up. Reading her pearls, I can almost feel a sort of mirror passion, almost. Many books make you cry at the end. This book made me cry that it had an end, the sort of crying you'd do over a lost sister, forever wishing you'd only taken more photographs, forever knowing no volume of keepsake could be sufficient for the lack.