LEGION OF CHRIST COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES

Fleeting Nature and the Steadfastness of God

High Waving Heather, an Experience of Transitory Things

Professor: Dr. Josef Froula

Student: Emmanuel Flores, LC
Course: Literature
Third Semester Paper
Cheshire, October 31, 2017
I. The Mysterious Author

Soft sounding stanzas describing nature’s poetic effect on the soul on the one hand and a
complex novel of catastrophic love affairs on the other are both the literary heights achieved by
Emily Brontë. Her quiet and reserved personality, as well as her short lifespan, shed a mysterious
aura around one of the greatest female writers in history. Little do we know of her and what we
do know comes to us secondhand from the biographers of her famous sister Charlotte Brontë.

Literary criticism of her works is also scarce and complex due to the seeming
contradictions of her writing styles. Wuthering Heights is as dark and sinister as High Waving
Heather is light and warm.

Of the different opinions held by Brontë’s scholars and admirers about her writings, the
one that seems held by most is that she wrote experiences, not descriptions. In Last Things, a
book about her poetry we find the following analysis, “as a writer, Emily Brontë didn’t suffer
from an anxiety of authorship. In her poems, she succeeded in authorizing herself as the subject
of her own experience, apparently without wondering whether that experience was eccentric and
trivial or, contrarily, profoundly relevant to others.”1

In other words, Brontë’s poems were deeply hers. In them, she relates to us how she saw
the world and what she had learned from it. In High Waving Heather, she does not describe her
world to us; she makes us experience what she experiences. We follow the depth of her thoughts
as she contemplates nature. It is as if she offers us her soul’s mystical experience of nature for
our own benefit. She is not one content with girly depictions of flowers bending in the wind, but
desires for us to see “Man’s spirit […] bursting the fetters and breaking the bars,”2 while
contemplating the “High Waving Heather ‘neath stormy blasts bending.”3

If such is her mode of writing poetry, then this early poem of hers –which at first can
appear to be simple musings on scenes in nature– can be interpreted as a profoundly painted
picture of the transience of nature, a meditation on the brevity of life as observed in the natural
world.

1
GEZARI JANET, Last Things, Emily Brontë’s Poems, P. 1-2
2
BRONTË EMILY, High Waving Heather
3
Ibid.
2
II. Fleeting Nature

In High Waving Heather, we receive an experience of ongoing change and

incompleteness, from the heather in the wind to the moonlight and stars to mountainsides to
rivers and from there onto the flow of its ever-changing waters. Nothing is recurrent; no theme
endures. As we find in the poem, everything is “changing forever […] coming as swiftly and
fading as soon.”4

The structure of the poem itself aids this idea of change and movement. As is said in an
analysis by author Janet Gezari, the poem itself “communicates an excess of vital stimulation
and a readiness for sudden and fleeting visionary flights and plunges with a gallop of present
participles that imitates the rapidly shifting motions of the natural world.”5

Exteriorly we observe with her the natural phenomena of the day’s evolution and the
changing weather. The day moves through midnight to noon. The weather is stormy and at
moments it “roars like thunder” and at others, it is “like soft music sighing” and the ephemeral
“lightning-bright flashes come swift and fade soon”6 The scenery also flows from valley to
mountain to forest back to the valley and from there to desolate desert.

Interiorly we experience the dynamism. Our spirit also bursts the “fetters and bars” of our
present moment and moves along rending and wending through the “reckless course.” We
“advance and we fly” until at last we are thrown off by what “soon fades.”7 The movement ends
and our spirit returns to the present dizzied by the many changes and realizing that truly nothing
remains, Παντα Ρει.8

III. A Steadfast Rock

4
BRONTË EMILY, High Waving Heather
5
GEZARI JANET, Last Things, Emily Brontë’s Poems, P. 8
6
Cf. BRONTË EMILY, High Waving Heather
7
Cf. Ibid.
8
Attributed to HERACLITUS, it literally means everything flows.
3
 We cannot end there, with this sense of incompleteness and ever-flowing cycles of
change. Neither could Emily Brontë be content with this vision of fleetingness. Interestingly her
last poem stands in striking contrast to this earlier poem of hers, High Waving Heather. Titled by
some Last Lines, since it was the last poem she would ever write the poem begins “No coward
soul is mine. No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.”9 She is no longer storm-tossed,
no longer moved from one scene to the next. Her solemn poem goes on to explain why.

As explained by Janet Gezari in her book Last Things, this poem Brontë “expresses her
faith in an infinite, enduring life pervading the universe and in the soul brave enough to claim its
participation in that life.”10

Her words speak of the anchor she has found. Nothing can shake her who is at the end of
her life:

“Holding so fast by thy infinity,

So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.” 11

The contrast is amazing. Nature, once so important to this woman poet considered a
romantic precisely for her use of nature in her poetry, sees at the end of her life that which is
truly steadfast and immutable.

Nature itself is fleeting as in High Waving Heather, but her love of it will not let it be so.
She believes firmly that in God it will all remain and endure. Her last lines explain it well, the
experience she wishes us to have is that of an immovable trust in God.

9
BRONTË EMILY, No Coward Soul is Mine
10
GEZARI JANET, Last Things, Emily Brontë’s Poems, P. 134
11
BRONTË EMILY, No Coward Soul is Mine
4
 “Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee.”

“There is no room for Death,

Nor atom that his might could render void
Since Thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.” 12

12
BRONTË EMILY, No Coward Soul is Mine
5
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

BRONTË, E., High Waving Heather, A Muse of Fire, Unpublished

BRONTË, E., No Coward Soul is Mine, http://www.online-literature.com/bronte/1352/. Accessed:

10-26-2017

GEZARI, J., Last Things, Emily Brontë’s Poems, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007