“High waving heather ’neath stormy blasts bending” – Emily’s Gothic Landscape

Manuela Neves

The Emily Brontë’s poem “High waving heather ’neath stormy blasts bending”
dated back to december 13, 1836, reveals a landscape full of melancholy very similar to
the image that we find in “Huthering Heights” some years later. The poem is written in
three stanzas of six verses, so there is a struture. But since the focus of the present work
is the meaning of it, I will set the struture aside. The opening verse gives a image of a
small and delicate flower – a heather – that bends because of the fierce weather. As a
possible interpretation, we can think about the see-through wall the divides and
symbolizes the duality between the characters of the Brontë’s novels and these
characters internal value. Right bellow, the second and third verses are a syntatical and
semantical unit since they complete each other. The image formed with them is of a
corrupted, exquisite joy in the dark cenario – which concerns to the negative gothic
circle, present in “Wuthering Heighs” as well.

Along with this image of terror, the three final verses of the stanza invert the
natural order of the Victorian Society by switching the divine and the human places –
“Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending” (ALEXANDER, 2010, p. 393). This
invertion continues with the idea constructed in the following two verses that there is a
cage, a dungeon (probably the victorian society) that keeps preventing that men kind
break the very strict social rules. Then, passing to the the second and middle stanza, the
focus is the nature and its power, giving to this excerpt a romantic aesthetic along with
the gothic one. So, the first two verses of this part create the image of the union of
between mountains, forest and wind whose coexistence is capable of giving life. Beside
that, the remaining verses of the stanza are all linked by their syntatics and semantics;
while the excerpt inciates with the wind, the ending brings the concept of the river. Its
banks and waters pass fast through the vallys, leaving a course that expands more and
more and behind leaves nothing but a desert. So the nature is capable of giving life and
taking it back too.

Finally, the last stanza iniciates with the adjective sequence of “Shining and
lowering and swelling and dying” (ALEXANDER, 2010, p. 393) that sugests the cycle
of the day – the sun rises, lowers down the horizon, inflames itself in multiple colors
and then die – or the rainy sky cycle – the lightnings come, the sky lowers, the darkness
grow and then everything is calm once again. But the following verse suggest that the
first refers to the perpetual circle of days, since the line right below talks about the
dicotomy night-day – in this exact order. Then there is a conflict of images because the
sound is compared at the same time to a thunder and to a very soft music. One plausible
reason for that is the already mentioned duality between the character itself and its
internal value – so the thunder would be the first one and the music the second, since it
is a deeper extract and least “audible”. Therefore the three final verses build the mental
picture of dark, where is no light and even shadows have shadows. The only light comes
from the lightnings that appear from nowhere and to void return. In that way, the last
stranza have the aesthetic of the classic gothic and creates a reality where only non-
human nature rules.

So we can find multiple types of gothics elements in each one of the stranzas,
starting with the victorian gothic, romantic gothic and finally the classic gothic.
Moreover this progression gives the notion that men kind are fighting against nature
(and here nature is more likely to be a metaphore to the social rules), they break their
cages, are caught by the nature that gave life to them and the nature wins (or the social
system wins).

REFERENCE

ALEXANDER, Christine. Emily Brontë. In: ALEXANDER, Christine. The Brontës:

tales of glass town, angria, and gondal selected early writings. New York: Oxford Press
Inc, 2010. p. 393-437.

MOURA, Caroline Navarrina de. Explorando novos mundos: da fantasia ao gótico em

angria e gondal (brontë juvenilia. Porto Alegre: Ufrgs, 2023. Color.