Emily Brontë is the author of one of my favorite books, Wuthering Heights. Not only was she a novelist, but she wrote poetry as well. She and her sister, Charlotte produced works of literature that we still read, love, and study – almost 200 years later. Wuthering Heights by Emily and Jane Eyre by Charlotte were published the same year, 1847. This week, we have a poem from Emily called, “Often rebuked, yet always back returning.”
Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:
To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.
I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.
What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
Featured image courtesy of Daily Mail