‘I would have touched the heavenly key’: Dissonance in Emily Brontë’s Fragments and William Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’

Abstract

This paper explores the dissonance created when Emily Brontë’s striving to find language that equals her ‘world within’ is constrained by the ‘world without’. The title quotation, the opening line of one of Brontë’s early fragments, highlights the intensity of her desire to wake the song that so moved her in the past. It is Emily Brontë’s struggle to wake the ‘entrancing song’ coupled with the pull of the ‘heavenly key’ that impels her poetry. In her treatment of desire to re-enter states of past bliss, Emily Brontë is an heir of Wordsworth. Reading her poems alongside Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, I explore how Wordsworth’s cry of ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam’ is also Brontë’s. Yet, this dissonance is for both poets, to use Emily’s own words, a ‘darling pain’. The longing, even with the pain, is a form of fulfilment. So, I conclude by arguing that this seeming dissonance is what gives Brontë’s poetry its ‘peculiar music’.