The Windy Moors

The snow continues and, apart from the images it evokes of Imperial Russia - the winter balls, the opulent carriages, the wilderness of Siberia, and the snowflakes on the lamps of Grand Duke Serge's carriage, as he and Ella (Grand Duchess Elizabeth) emerge from the theatre only days before his assassination; Ella, kneeling over his remains in the snow...It also brings to mind the 'wily windy Moors' of Emily Bronte's beautiful experience (and Kate Bush's fabulous interpretation of it!).

Today, according to the local news, Haworth was deep in snow. The silence and bleakness of snow seems so apt for the fascinating soul of Emily Bronte! Seemingly sheltered, the daughter of a parson, cut off from the world, despising having to be in company - to the extent that she was ill if she were compelled to be away from the freedom of the Moors and her own inner world for any length of time - she lived within herself with so mystical and imaginative an inner life that she seemed barely capable of surviving in the day-to-day world. The contrast of appearances and what is really so, is so striking in Emily Bronte!

At the top of a hill, the parsonage overlooks a graveyard where many of the headstones were originally laid flat on the earth so that wolves didn't dig up the bodies, or so that - which is more macabre? - the undertakers could turn the stones over and engrave names on the other side to fit more bodies into the graves! This was the view from Emily's windows. All around was the great expanse of the Moors. She never married. She never did very much at all. A brief spell in Brussels, where she was viewed as unfriendly; working as a teacher and hating every moment that kept her away from the freedom to walk and think and be with her beautiful animal friends...And yet, what an inner life that came out in such writing as 'Wuthering Heights' with its darkness and shadow side, with its passion and sheer, raw, untamed emotion and 'violence' - truly Nature in the raw. No wonder she is seen as such a 'Pagan soul'!

To me, Emily Bronte is a true mystic. Her soul was forever 'in another place' and unfettered. If only she had found a way to live on earth what her soul was reaching for! Her brilliant poem The Prisoner speaks so clearly of that anguish of disparity between 'what the soul knows' and physical life; the sense of being enchained in a body:

...Mute music soothes my breast - unutter'd harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.

O dreadful is the check - intense the agony -
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb - the brain to think again -
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

I wish she could have found a way for her Spirit to be free, without having to leave at such an early age. But she loved the inner worlds, and the beautiful snow creates that sense of
stillness, wherein the inner and the outer merge.