Thursday, May 5, 2016

Emily Brönte: What influenced her poems?

Over the past months, I have been reading various poems by Emily Brönte. my favourite one so far was probably "The night is darkening round me", which I analysed here on blogger. This is why I decided to look into the life of Emily to truly understand what is behind her poems.

Brönte was born during the First World War in a small English village called Haworth, in West Yorkshire. Her mother tragically died of cancer when Brönte was two years old, leaving her five daughters and one son. With most children being sent Cowan Bridge School, two of Brönte's sisters also became writers. Her two other sisters finished school early because they were very sick, later passing away.

This very likely affected her writing. In her poem, there are often characters with no parents, no other or they were abandoned. She was vey interested in nature, which is also reflected in her writing: birds, plants and other forms of nature often appear in many of her poems.

Like many writers at her time, Brönte wrote poems about being in jail, as well as dying. Along with her sisters, she wrote small books of poems and even wrote a book called "Withering Heights". In poems, she often described am imaginary world she called "Gondal", which she defined as a world of"royalty, intrigue, abandonment, war, murder and assassination.

During victorian times, people tended to die at a much younger age. Diseases were spread at a much faster rate and people would mostly live inn unhygienic conditions. Brönte herself believed in Christianity. Like today, many Christians would embrace death. The only difference is that Christianity would be much more important to the daily life of an Englishman than today. In conclusion, Emily Brönte's poems were mainly influenced by death. her siblings, her personal interests and Victorian culture.

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