This article reexamines Emily Brontë’s poetry focusing on dungeons and imprisonment, discussing how her prisoner characters compare their incarceration to being buried alive. Strong poetic and thematic dynamics of rising and falling also structure these experiences, particularly as manifest in depictions of the yearning soul flying away from the inert, living-dead body. Little Brontë scholarship has focused, thus far, on the actual narratives and themes of the Gondal poems, and still less on their philosophical significance, a lacuna this article hopes to begin to fill. It considers these poems in relation to the homophonic and etymological linkage of grave (receptacle for the dead) and grave (weighty, serious) with engrave , to inscribe something into a hard surface, often stone, using a lens informed by Mary Jacobus’s work on the gravity of things in nineteenth-century poetry, and Simone Weil’s writing on limitation and transcendence. Ultimately, it argues that Brontë’s philosophical and poetic priorities lie in this movement between states, in the phenomenology of yearning for such a paradoxical liberation, and in the body’s gravity, a metaphor for mortal time, upon which souls and poems might be engraved.
Anna Rivers (Wed,) studied this question.