Victorian Poetry:A Paper Collection, Cordelia Clark [black books to read .TXT] 📗

Victorian Poetry: A Paper Collection
By Cordelia Clark
Copyright 2011 by Cordelia Clark
Bookrix Edition

Dedication
For B. Williams, with love and devotion.


About the Author
Cordelia Clark loves poetry, especially Victorian Poetry. Her favorite Victorian Poets and Emily Bronte , Christina Rosetti, and Adelaid Anne Proctor. Prior works on smashwords include an anthology of Poetry: Chronicles of Bursts of Light and Shadow: Poems of Bipolar Depression. Cordelia loves hearing from her readers. If you would like to contact Cordelia, you may email her at inkblotsbycordelia@gmail.com

Acknoledgements
Dr. Kwaja at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA for inspiring me. For Opah, may the lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from another. B. Williams, for support and being a love everlasting. Christina Rossetti, for your wonderful goblins. Emily Bronte, I too watch a grave. Jeanine Mason, my unofficial editor.


Seduced by Death:

Memory, Romanticism, and Time in Emily Bronte’s “Remembrance”

By Cordelia Clark

English 322: Victorian Poetry


The pathology of memory, with its nuances of light and shadow, run through Emily Bronte’s poem “Remembrance” like water through the roots of the ferns that cover the Yorkshire moors upon which she is recorded to have played as a child (Wilson, 25). It is in this poetic work that she questions the definitions of memory, as well as its meaning as it relates to recalling memory. Not only does Bronte question recollection of events, but she inquires regarding separation and what it means to forget. “Remembrance” also has a sense of irony and paradox; there is irony in the use of the words “forget” and “remember.” Simultaneously, Bronte interjects a theme of time as it relates to the memory’s definition, recollection, separation, and the indication of the failure of memory.
In the first stanza of “Remembrance,” the narrator expresses a fear of forgetting to continue to love her lover that is now dead. She also conveys a fear of disconnection. “Have I forgot, my only love, to love thee,/ severed at last by Time’s all severing wave?”(3-4). Here the source of disconnection is time, a theme which appears repeatedly throughout the work. Irony is also seen in these lines because if the narrator has actually forgotten her lover, then she would not even pose the question. The irony in these lines is especially efficient in conveying a sense of fear. This is because a statement of what has not been forgotten is more effective than a statement of what is remembered. There is also irony in these lines with relationship to the title of the poem, as the title is “Remembrance” and “forgot” appears in the third line, which leads the reader to inquire as to what Bronte is trying to convey about memory itself. Here she poses the idea that memory has a life span: “Severed at last by Time’s all severing wave”(4). It may also be interpreted that memory is a sense of mourning. “Have I forgot my only love to love thee,” (3). Because the deceased is the narrator’s “only love” there is a sense of mourning that is conveyed. These lines also inspire the question of whether or not memory is something that is a constant:
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,
Severed at last by Time’s all severing wave? (1-4).

The narrator is separated from her lover by time in the form of winter, as expressed in the first line by the use of the word cold and the description of snow. “Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee” (1). As she is separated by time and physical location, the reader may construe that the narrator feels as though she must be constantly connected to her lover through mourning, a form of remembrance. Steve Vines addresses this in his journal article “Romantic Ghosts: The Refusal of Mourning in Emily Bronte’s Poetry.”
If vision is housed in the grave in Bronte, the logic of its inurnment—and it’s spectral return—is dramatized is one of the most remarkable of the Gondal Poems, published in 1846 under the title “Remembrance” (Poem 116). This poem is an act of mourning by a female speaker for her lost beloved, who has been “Cold in the earth” for “fifteen wild Decembers”(1,9). The poem charts the speaker’s struggle to replace the beloved with “other” desires and hopes, and maps the mourner’s attempt to substitute for the lost object (110).

Here Vines reinforces that the narrator is in fact female and that she is in a state of mourning over her lover. He further discusses the mourning of the beloved as it relates to disconnection and asserts that in order to be in mourning over the beloved, the female speaker must be in “painful withdrawal” from the beloved. “According to Freud, the “work of mourning” consists in the painful withdrawal of the subject’s attachment to a loved but lost object, and its reluctant reinvestment in “a substitute [that] is already beckoning” to it”(111). She is disconnected from her lover by death in the form of physical location, as he is “cold in the earth” (1) instead of on the earth with her. In lines two and four of this stanza, the narrator expresses her fear that she is severed from her connection with her lover. Line two illustrates a loss by physical distance, with distance being the grave. “Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave.” Line four emphasizes a separation based on time, as it mention’s “Time’s all-severing wave.” Time is also alluded to in line two with the mention of “cold,” as this is a reference to winter. Thus, she is painfully separated from her lover.
Romanticism appears in the second stanza:
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? (5-8).

A sense of romanticism is expressed when the narrator speaks of her thoughts hovering over the grave of her beloved, as it is an aspect of sentimentality. It also appears when she gives the title of “noble” to her lover’s heart in line eight: “Thy noble heart for ever, ever more.” Repetition of the word “ever” in this line also illustrates this. Stanza two suggests that memory looses it’s romanticism due to separation. This separation occurs when the narrator’s thoughts “no longer hover/Over the mountains on that northern shore”(5-6). Bronte also illustrates the mobility of the narrator’s thoughts when she reference’s their “wings.” “Resting their wings where heath and fern leaves cover”(7). The concept of traveling thoughts implies that memory has only an idealized sense of Romanticism. This is because the mere fact that the narrator’s thoughts cease to “hover” over the grave of her beloved suggests that memory at a subconscious level moves on after a period of grieving. This period of grieving is related to the idea that remembrance is a type of mourning, and is best illustrated by conceptualizing the season change between the first and second stanza. In stanza one, the grave was covered by snow and was described as “dreary.” “Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee,/Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave”(1-2). Lines seven through eight of the second stanza describe the grave as being covered by fern leaves, which illustrates a season change: “Resting their wings where heath and fern leaves cover/Thy noble heart for ever, ever more.” Janet Gezari discusses this in her article, “Fathoming Remembrance: Emily Bronte in Context.” She connects the fear of the female speaker’s forgetfulness of her lover to Freud’s “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis.” She states that everything conscious is subject to a process of wearing away, a process to which she feels Bronte is quite aware of, and thus it is the basis of her fear.
Bronte’s conviction that memory never dies, even in sleep, anticipates Freud. Recognizing that there is no cure for memeory, psychoanalysis presents itelse as a cure for forgetting or pretending to forget by turning symptoms, which are like monuments in the patient’s psyche, into conscious memories, available for processing. Bronte’s protest against death requires the survival of remembrance, and like Freud, she is alert to how memory threatens that survival. Her poem “Remembrance” turns on the axis of this dense psychological contradiction. Freud formulates the threat memory poses most clearly in his “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis: I then made some short oversevations upon the psychological differences between the conscious and the unconscious, and upon the fact that everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing away (965-966).

Thus it may be concluded that Bronte is defining memory in terms of mourning a lover, as remembrance is a type of mourning. Gezari addresses Bronte’s view on recollection of events and asserts that it is Bronte’s view that as memory never dies, recollection of events is based upon how accessible the memory is to the individual.
The pervious line mentions “mountains” and a “shore,” each which are barriers. “Over the mountains, on that northern shore”(7). This suggests that there is an inaccessibility of the lover to the beloved, which ties in with the theme of separation. Interestingly, the mountains and the shore are only mentioned subsequent to the season change. This insinuates that time is, once again, involved with the separation of the lover and the narrator.
Change of season is once again picked up in stanza three:
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! (9-12).

Winter is referenced in line nine with the usage of the words “cold” and “Decembers,” as well as in line ten with the reference to “brown hills.” The repetition of the phrase “cold in the earth” here is important. In the first stanza, the phrase “cold in the earth” that appears in line one is necessary to convey a sense distance between the narrator and her lover due to time in the form of season and by physical distance illustrated in the grave. Repetition of the phrase exemplifies that time has become a stronger factor. Winter was initially referred to by the words “cold” and “snow.” “Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee,”(1). Now it is referred to using “cold” and the image of “fifteen wild Decembers.” “Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers”(9). It is in this stanza that the concept of separation by time is further modified, as the coldest and darkest month of the year is on the Yorkshire moor is used to describe it (Wilson, 76). Bronte also describes the Decembers as “wild,” which modifies the sense of time to be one that was fully desolately violent. Desolate violence, as Romer Wilson explains in her biography of Emily Jane Bronte, is a projection of her soul within relation to her relationship to the moor.
Creatures of the moor are not exempt from the strife of the moor. They get a pride, a self-pride that longs for Paradise and