| Title | : | The Complete Poems |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0231103476 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780231103473 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 262 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1846 |
The Complete Poems Reviews
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If I could rate this one billion stars, I would. These poems are incredibly precious to me – they've been with me throughout the bad times and the good, ever-present in my life.
There's not a lot I wouldn't do to somehow turn back time and rescue the rest of the Gondal work. -
Emily Jane Brontë’s poems are beyond beautiful and truly the most stunning poems I have ever read.
They’re full of longing, sadness, loneliness, life, death, nature, love, hope, loss, grief, despair, desire, fear and peacefulness. There’s so much pain and passion.
On the back of my book it describes Brontë’s poems as “passionate and powerful works that convey the vitality of the human spirit and the natural world”.
These poems have a very special place in my heart and I will treasure them forever. They will be joining me in my grave when I die -
Come, Walk With Me
Come, walk with me,
There's only thee
To bless my spirit now -
We used to love on winter nights
To wander through the snow;
Can we not woo back old delights?
The clouds rush dark and wild
They fleck with shade our mountain heights
The same as long ago
And on the horizon rest at last
In looming masses piled;
While moonbeams flash and fly so fast
We scarce can say they smiled -
Come walk with me, come walk with me;
We were not once so few
But Death has stolen our company
As sunshine steals the dew -
He took them one by one and we
Are left the only two;
So closer would my feelings twine
Because they have no stay but thine -
'Nay call me not - it may not be
Is human love so true?
Can Friendship's flower droop on for years
And then revive anew?
No, though the soil be wet with tears,
How fair soe'er it grew
The vital sap once perished
Will never flow again
And surer than that dwelling dread,
The narrow dungeon of the dead
Time parts the hearts of men -' -
Here I am at the end of the complete poetical works of the third of the three Brontë sisters (the third in the order I read them, that is; Emily was the middle sister, age-wise) and it’s been a maudlin trip. Emily was perhaps a little cheerier than her siblings but she too was prone to dark moods.
The most interesting part of this collection to me was the concept of Gondal, which was a fantasy world illustrated by a long series of poems. I’d be interested to see the Gondal poems presented in a cohesive collection, with the individual poems set in the chronology of events in Gondal, to see how much of this world we could really see.
The only thing I didn’t like was her incessant use of visual rhymes. They’re like a painful stone in my shoe every damned time I come across one. The editor talks about them in the notes (of which there are many) and apparently they weren’t visual rhymes at the time they were written; they’ve just become them due to the changes in the pronunciation in the intervening years. Even with this in mind, though, they still mar my enjoyment.
For him who struck thy foreign string
I ween this heart hath ceased to care
Then why dost thou such feelings bring
To my sad spirit, old guitar?
It is as if the warm sunlight
In some deep glen should lingering stay
When clouds of tempest and of night
Had wrapped the parent orb away –
It is as if the glassy brook
Should image still its willows fair
Though years ago the woodman’s stroke
Laid low in dust their gleaming hair:
Even so, guitar, thy magic tone
Hath moved the tear and waked the sigh
Hath bid the ancient torrent flow
Although its very source is dry!
My next book:
Mr. Strong -
Every time I reread Wuthering Heights, I marvel at Emily's writing style and nature description but feel like something is missing for me. I appreciate Wuthering Heights but never find it easy to say that I enjoy it wholeheartedly. I have wanted to read her poetry for years and decided to finally bite bullet and read the complete collection despite not being very well versed with poetry in general. And oh how I loved every single of the poems! There's something so haunting and heartbreakingly beautiful in them. I could almost hear the wind on the lonely moors and the coldness after a long wanderings in the mornings. The loneliness, grief, sadness is there... The problem with complete poems is that the poems can get a bit daunting and repetitive but I actually enjoyed seeing the recurring themes and images Brontë used in her poems all together. She writes about grief, nature and love in such a distinct way that it feels almost impossible to know that Emily died in the very early years of her adulthood. Reading Emily Brontë's poetry has definitely been some of the highlights of this year.
-
4'5
In dungeons dark I cannot sing
In sorrow's thrall 'tis hard to smile
What bird can soar with broken wing
What heart can bleed and joy the while -
A few months ago, I got a meme in Facebook, asking me to talk about my favorite books. The experience was a very dark, painful afternoon of thinking about books. Books are too much like friends for my relationships to be terribly healthy with - God knows I mistreat my friends. But in that meme, I wrote about Emily Dickinson, about how it was difficult to seperate the woman from the poetry. I have this sort of purist mind that tells me that's asign of weakness, that I'm conflating good writing with a good backstory. But, 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 put 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 keep up good realtions with me, than... well, I wouldn't wish that standard on anyone. I feel cruel rating a book, because I'm passing a judgement 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, after all, that everyone on earth was given the value their mother's 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 somethign 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 embarrased 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 - everyhting 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 seperate 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 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 dizzing, 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.
ORiginal Review -
Me ha durado tiempo, lo he disfrutado, pero no el que más
-
تطلب إنتهائي من قراءة مجموعة أشعار إميلي برونتي وقتا طويلا وهذا لصعوبة الكثير من الكلمات ، لكن لم أندم على أي ثانية أمضيتها مع هذا الكتاب... أن تعرف أن معظم هذه القصائد لم يكتب على نية النشر يعطيك شعورا بالألفة ، بالحميمية و كأنك تقرأ أشعار صديق مقرب ، إميلي كتبت ربما لتقلل من وحدتها في ذلك البيت الريفي ، الطقس البارد و الطبيعة المحيطة كانا مصدر إلهام لها سواء في قصائدها أو في روايتها مرتفعات وذرينغ ... إميلي تكتب لنا عن علاقة الإنسان بالطبيعة ، عن روح الإنسان ، ظلمة هذه الروح و نورها ,عن العزلة بسوداويتها و كآبتها ....
The day is done, the winter sun
Is setting in its sullen sky;
And drear the course that has been run,
And dim the hearts that slowly die.
No star will light my coming night;
No morn of hope for me will shine; -
EMILY VC FEZ TUDOOOOOOOOO O QUE FOI ISSO MEU DEUS, SUBLIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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4 stars
Brontë’s poems explore so many mournful, despondent themes- yet somehow to read them was comforting. To read her words was to recognise that someone else felt the pain that you feel. We are not alone, simply human.
Memory is both benign and harrowing. What does it mean to remember past joys? Does it console us by subduing “both grief and passion wild” with remembrance of a happier time? Or does it only accentuate our present sorrow- “if I awake a note / That gave me joy before / Sounds of sorrow from thee float / Changing evermore”. The conflict that arises from our ability to remember is perfectly captured in her writing.
The notes of grief that play throughout her poetry don’t encourage despair, but make your loneliness feel less lonely. Her poems relate how one can turn to oneself, how we can sink into our own internal world and find solace there. We can be our own comforter- “Sure solacer of human cares, / And sweeter hope, when hope despairs.”
And she gives hope to those throughout her poems. Fear of death and of loss haunts us all, but to read her words can allay that for a little while.
“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” -
Emily Bronte casts a spell on her readers, as she writes to haunt, to torment, to agonise and inspire. She has a most designated place in the palace dedicated to Gothic literature. She pulls her readers into dark, enchanted forests in which one may easily imagine falling in love… with the wrong person. Her poetry echoes and creaks with a tender, macabre influence and mystical provocation.
What I didn’t like about this particular collection is how redundant her themes and even language tend to be. About halfway through, I became quite tired of the poetry as it almost started to feel as though I was reading the same exact poem over and over and over again, with only slight differences.
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. -
Emily Bronte is such a mystery. How could she write such fierce fiction. There is power and deep longing in her poetry especially her Gondal poems which she used for Wuthering Heights. I want to write a story about that! Love her.
-
Nothing too special, nothing particularly striking. Brontë has a distinct voice and ethereal style, but it is unfortunately hampered by overdone themes.
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This book revived my fate in poetry
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phenomenal.
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Seitdem ich die Gedichte von Emily Brontë in dieser wunderschönen alten Penguin Classics Ausgabe gelesen habe, habe ich eine ganz ganz große Liebe zu Gedichten entwickelt. Bereits die deutschen Dichter Goethe und Schiller konnten mich von ihren zahlreichen Gedichten überzeugen. Nun habe ich auch die englischen bzw. viktorianischen Dichter und Lyriker für mich entdecken können.
Emily Jane Brontë, die Autorin von „Wuthering Heights“, ist einer der talentiertesten weiblichen Autorinnen des viktorianischen Zeitalters und für mich unvergleichlich. Das haben mir ihre Gedichte nun gezeigt. Sie sind perfekt für den Herbst und die kalten Jahreszeiten - düster, schaurig, wehmütig, melancholisch und beruhigend zugleich. Ich habe es so genossen, in die Gefühlswelt Brontë‘s einzudringen, habe mitgefühlt und bin völlig abgetaucht. Fast schon melodisch lassen sich ihre Gedichte lesen und haben mich ganz verschiedene Emotionen fühlen lassen. Beim Lesen hatte ich eine Gänsehaut. Was ihre Worte und Verse mit mir und wahrscheinlich auch mit anderen Leser*innen bewirken ist einfach nur ... wow! Sie haben mich in meinem Kopf ständig begleitet, waren ständig present und haben mich oftmals schlaflos zurück gelassen. Selten habe ich so etwas beim Lesen von Worten gespürt. Dieses Gedichtband hat meine Liebe zum Lesen, aber nicht nur zum Lesen von Prosa, sondern zum Lesen von allem, was Worte ausdrücken können, erneut entfacht. Lest es! Lest es, wenn ihr ebenso verliebt in Worte und Verse seid - wenn ihr abtauchen und eure innere Stimme etwas lauter hören wollt. Auch wenn die englische Sprache an dieser Stelle eine kleine Herausforderung war, lohnt es sich in jedem Fall, sich damit trotzdem auseinanderzusetzen! -
La intensidad poética de Emily es muy interesante y maravillosa de leer. Sobretodo comparado con Cumbres Borrascosas. Al igual que su novela, el clima acompaña mucho. Es mejor leerlo en tormenta que en el sol.
Pero lo que más me impresiona, es la forma de que pocas palabras te cuenten una historia fascinante. Me hubiera encantado leer los poemas relacionados a la historia que creo junto a su Hermana Anne, en orden cronológico. Para haber apreciado más ese mundo.
Para mi, lo que más me costó fue el inglés. Pero a mi se me ocurre leer un inglés tan antiguo, con mi inglés básico, fue tormentoso el intentar leer a la primera el poema.
Porque por dios que es difícil este inglés jajajaja. -
Los poemas de Emily son sinceros, apasionados, elocuentes y narrativos. Para mi infinitamente preferibles que poemas con mucha pompa y plagados de estereotipos (como es bien frecuente en escritores hombres de la época - tipo Byron, Wordsworth). Los temas frecuentes son el luto, la ansiedad y la naturaleza. Me encantaron, muy recomendados!
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Con este poemario termino de leer a Emily Bronte, una autora que me da rabia que no hubiera podido seguir escribiendo, por morir tan joven. Tenia muchísimo talento, ya me conquistó con cumbres borrascosas y su poesía es preciosa, trata muchísimos temas, inventa historias, las ambienta en una isla ficticia situada al norte del Pacífico llamada Gondal, también nos muestra sus preocupaciones, lo sola que se sentía en muchas ocasiones. Además está edición es bilingüe y tenemos la oportunidad de comparar la traducción con la versión original, una gozada. Muy recomendable.
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Una absoluta maravilla, una joya. He disfrutado de principio a fin de los poemas de Emily (cargados de intensidad, romanticismo y melancolía), cuya lectura he ido dosificando a lo largo de lo 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. -
Poetry is hard for me and I think it always will be. Some of these were pure brilliance, but there were a lot and so their quality differed throughout. Although I suppose that's to be expected with any complete works. A must read for Bronte fans, especially if you loved the darkness of Wuthering Heights. .
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Los poemas de Emily son tan buenos como "Cumbres borrascosas", sin embargo es en estos donde encontramos la verdadera voz de la escritora inglesa. Muy recomendables.
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No heart can quite repress the anguish
Of leaving things that once were dear -
Actual rating: 4.5 stars.
I have finally done it: I've read Emily's poetry in its entirety (well except the lost ones). This collection is brilliant for those of you who want to read Emily's poetry. Janet Gezari has spilt Emily's verse into 5 categories: poems published in 1846, dated poems, undated poems, poems of doubtful authorship and poems as edited by Charlotte in 1850. This makes reading them much more enjoyable as you can watch Emily's writing develop and see how she begins to experiment with her verse a little more.
The only reason I rated this down by half a star (*cue shocked faces*) is because there was the occasional poem that didn't interest me as much as the others. Sometimes, I find Emily's Gondal poems a little heavy (despite them being so interesting, and demonstrating her brilliance so wonderfully). Also, even though this shouldn't affect the rating as it's not technically Emily, I didn't enjoy Charlotte's revisions. It was so obvious to me that they weren't Emily's true and natural work; they felt utterly different.
Despite this, this was a lovely collection of poetry. Emily has such an enchanting way with verse. I definitely think her best ability lies with her nature poems; these are my ultimate favourites. They just click with me because I often understand and appreciate exactly what she is saying. If I've taken anything away from reading Emily's poetry in its entirety then it's the solidification that 'The Bluebell is the sweetest flower' is my favourite poem by her. This is such a paradoxical, heart-warming and tender read for me. I feel what she is saying on a spiritual(?) level.
I'd definitely recommend this!!! -
I've never been a fan of "Wuthering Heights", but I love Emily's poetry. She's one of my most favourite poets. I was so inspired by her poems that I wrote the verses of my own, and I find them... well, promising.
Of long ago there is the world
That always speak to me -
The prose of Anne and verse of Emily.
Like see-breeze fresh, like gull's scream bold
Two novels. One thunder-blast, the earth of pain,
Wild winter rose in bloom,
Another is a sun-ray, shining through the gloom.
And poems - like a streaming rain,
Like moorland's own spirit.
Two sisters' souls spoke to mine
About a distant world divine
And - happy! - I could see it. -
4.5
One of my favourite books for sure. I love so many poems in this collection, especially because I can relate to how the speaker feels a lot. It's not 5 stars for me because it gets repetitive after a while...
The poems with descriptions of nature were my favourites, especially the ones that can also be understood as the feelings of the speaker.
I can see myself rereading this book over and over again and finding more ways to understand the poems. -
High waving heather 'neath stormy blasts bending
I don’t know how to rate and review poetry because I don’t know how to read poetry: this is the first collection I’ve picked up. 3 stars is probably unfair but feels like the only honest rating I can give. I did like Brontë’s work (and loved some individual poems), but I didn’t love it overall. It never really grabbed my attention the way prose fiction does, and my reading was so sporadic that it took me a year and one week (!) to get through.
Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars
In hindsight, I don’t think starting with a “collected works” was a good idea. By its very nature, this collection includes the best of Brontë’s work—but also the worst. Without knowing anything about poetry, I can’t tell the two apart, and mixing them together means this volume is able to offer little in the way of an education. And by staying in the work of a single poet, I don’t have any context for what makes Brontë brilliant and unique compared to what else is out there.
Brontë seemed interested in a relatively narrow number of themes, primarily writing of death and despair and loneliness. There aren’t many lighthearted or “happy” moments. Because of this, the collection felt quite repetitive at times. However, the best (I think) poems are often bursting with emotion (usually anguish) that at times moved me deeply. She often speaks of longing for death, which is heartbreaking but honest. The poems are usually set on the desolate (and sometimes violent) but beautiful moors, and the effect can be appropriately moody and atmospheric. There’s some lovely nature writing—in fact, I would have liked more. The Emily Brontë of these verses certainly feels like the same who wrote Wuthering Heights.
This volume taught me some valuable things about reading poetry: Don’t read in a “sing-song” voice, but do read with an ear for rhythm. Reading aloud can be helpful. Read the notes (I was about 3/4 through before realizing there are extensive, and excellent, notes on each poem in the back of the book. Not only did these really enhance my understanding and appreciation of the poems, but I also realized that I should have been paying attention to the Gondol characters and their narratives—when viewed as scenes from a larger story, the Gondol poems become much more interesting rather than seeming like a random dialogue between two unknown people). Read a physical copy to mark up the poems, take notes, and better engage with the poet.
At some point, I may return to this volume. I’ll certainly be revisiting individual poems.
My favorite poems (in the order they appear):Stars
Remembrance
Song
Anticipation
The Prisoner (A Fragment)
How Clear She Shines
Self-Interrogation
Death
High waving heather ’neath stormy blasts bending
The night of storms has passed
O God of heaven! the dream of horror
Long neglect has worn away
Now trust a heart that trusts in you
Sleep brings no joy to me
The night is darkening round me
Song by Julius Angora
Lines
O mother I am not regretting
I’m happiest when most away
Fall leaves fall die flowers away
Loud without the wind was roaring
How still, how happy! those are words
I am the only being whose doom
May flowers are opening
Mild the mist upon the hill
The wind I hear it sighing
The Night-Wind
I see around me tombstones grey
H.A. and A.S.
To A. S. 1830
In the earth, the earth thou shalt be laid
At Castle Wood
A.G.A. to A.S.
D.G.C. to J.A.
From a Dungeon Wall in the Southern College
A.E. and R.C.
No coward soul is mine
Why ask to know the date — the clime?
All day I’ve toiled but not with pain
She dried her tears and they did smile -
Read at the pace of a listless turtle during slow moments in coffee shops, waiting rooms, or while driving. HA—I kid, I kid. A forgiving book for the seasons of unmotivated lulls that occasionally pay us homage.
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this is my one hundredth book this year 💗
