Moonlight, Summer Moonlight
by Emily Bronte
'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,
But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.
And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.
Bio note via http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org
Emily Bronte, born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England (1818) is the author of Wuthering Heights (1848), a story of love and tragedy set in the moors of Yorkshire.
She was the fifth of six talented Bronte children born to parents who seemed to have had no literary interest themselves. Their mother died when Emily was two, and the children were pretty much left to their own devices. Their father was aloof and treated his children as intellectual equals. Other than that, he mostly ignored them. The Bronte children had only themselves for playmates.
Their house was bounded on two sides by the village graveyard. They became best friends with each other. All the Bronte children were avid readers and storytellers. They made up a mythical land called Gondal, and Emily made it the subject of many of her poems. She was shy and reclusive and whenever she left home she got homesick. She joined her three older sisters at a school for clergymen's children when she was six. In 1845, Charlotte found out that Emily had been writing poetry. Charlotte had also been secretly writing verse, and so had Anne. They published their joint work the next year. Instead of using their real names, they called it Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. That book sold only two copies, but it paved the way for Charlotte's Jane Eyre (1846) and Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne's Agnes Grey (1847).
Jane Eyre was an instant success, but Emily's book didn't get much attention until after she fell ill and died the next year, at age thirty. Charlotte wrote a preface for it explaining why it was better than her own Jane Eyre, and it became a classic.
Recent Comments