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Thursday 24 February 2011

Emily Jane Brontë: Remembrance


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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Karpacz_Samotnia_sniezyca.jpg

Samotnia Shelter, Karpacz, Karkonosze, Poland: photo by Klapi, 2006




Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Sever'd at last by Time's all-severing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover
Thy noble heart for ever, ever more?

Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers
From those brown hills have melted into spring:
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!




German soldiers killed at Stalingrad: photo by USSR Ministry of Information, February 1943 (via Contemporary Military Historian)

Emily Jane Brontë (1818-1848): from Remembrance

3 comments:

TC said...

And too:

Emily Jane Brontë: "The night is darkening round me"

Anonymous said...

"Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Sever'd at last by Time's all-severing wave?"

This is remarkable and remarkably sad. There's a song I like called Everybody's Sometime And Some People's All The Time Blues whose lyrics and sentiments come to mind reading the Bronte.

"Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers
From those brown hills have melted into spring"

This is how things look and feel where we live in the Hudson Valley.

TC said...

Curtis,

Looking at that Stalingrad picture, I couldn't help thinking those young soldiers had mothers and perhaps sweethearts too -- though of course they had as we can see ended up in every possible way on the wrong side of everything.

Anyway I had hoped Emily wouldn't mind too much having her gesture of Remembrance stretched a bit to include them, in some sort of universal way.

I suppose meteorological accident inspired the image selection to some extent.

The weather in West Yorkshire, I hear, is not too bad today, at least in comparison with what's going on here.

Here it's raining intensely, in horizontal sheets, as gusts of wind off the ocean bend the great tree branches and all nature seems to groan, almost (yet not quite) drowning out the awful morning rush traffic racket out front. An Arctic cold front is roaring through and we are told to expect in its wake snow, sleet, black ice and temperatures in the 20s. We are receiving a steady spam-stream of helpful Severe Weather Alerts informing us, among other dangers, that older persons should stay indoors and wrap their pipes to minimize the chance of bursting. In the bonechilled nadir of this forever-winter I was thus briefly tempted to resign myself to the awful eventuality of bursting... until I paused a moment to sort out out the tangled syntax of the Alert.

Someone here has just bravely ventured out, and then after a while ventured back in, happily not yet having burst, though she did say that the grounds are littered with dead...

branches.