Celebrating National Poetry Day With Anne Bronte

This Thursday saw National Poetry Day arrive. I think poetry is too good to confine to just one day, and I’m sure the Brontës would have agreed – after all poetry was their first, and enduring, love and the very first Brontë book was a collection of poetry put together by Charlotte, Emily and Anne: the pseudonymous Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

If you live in the United Kingdom you can’t have helped but notice that there is more than an autumnal hint in the air. There is a wuthering chill developing and it won’t be long until we are all saying “winter draws on”. I think it’s fitting therefore that in today’s post we celebrate national poetry day/week with one of Anne Brontë’s poems which celebrates this kind of weather.

‘Lines Composed In A Wood On A Windy Day’ was one of the 21 poems by Anne Brontë selected for inclusion within ‘Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell’. Anne is at long last gaining recognition as one of the finest novelists of the nineteenth century, but I think she deserves to be remembered as one of its finest poets as well, as this composition shows. Composed in December 1842, Anne was seized by the poetic muse as she walked through the Long Plantation woods to the north of Thorp Green Hall where she was then governess (that’s the hall above).

“My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.
The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves, beneath them, are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.
I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing
The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;
I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,
And hear the wild roar of their thunder today!”