An Enduring Flame
She also edited ‘An Enduring Flame’; the Brontë Story in poetry and photographs with contributions from well-known poets inspired by the Brontë story, and also containing a vast number of splendid atmospheric photographs by Simon Warner.
The lives of the Brontës as seen through poetry and photographs.
‘An Enduring Flame’ is a unique and moving account in poetry and photographs of the lives of the Brontës and Haworth, their home. It endeavours to bring together, for the first time, some of the poetry composed by poets throughout the world who have been inspired by the Brontës.
The book contains around ninety poems dating from the nineteenth century to modern times, and includes contributions from fifty poets including Ted Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Cecil-Day Lewis, Sylvia Plath, Patricia Beer, James Kirkup, Ursula Fanthorpe, Ian McMillan, Adrian Henri and many others. Included also are poems by the Brontës themselves.
Along with the poems runs a narrative which gives the background to the lives of the Brontës. Images by Simon Warner capture the landscape known to the Brontës in all its moods and through the seasons. Some photographs illustrate famous Brontë locations, but may simply echo the moods that their lives invoke.
Together this collection creates an inspired and beautiful addition to the Brontë heritage.
Poems From This Volume
On Halley’s Comet
Our blazing guest, long have you been,
To us, and many more, unseen;
Full seventy years have pass’d away
Since last we saw you, fresh and gay –
Time seems to do you little wrong –
And yet, you sweep the sky along,
A thousand times more glib and fast,
Than railroad speed or sweeping blast –
Not so – the things you left behind –
Not so – the race of human kind,
Vast changes in this world have been,
Since by this world you were last seen:
The child who clapped his hands with joy,
And hailed thee as a shining toy,
Has pass’d long since, that dusky bourn,
From whence no travellers return;
Or shrinking now in feeble age,
Surveys thee, a mighty globe serene,
Wide hurried o’er the welkin sheen …
Patrick Brontë
Ellen Nussey Observes
Charlotte is painting my portrait
(I think there is nothing she cannot do!)
‘Dear Nell’, says she, ‘your eyes wander over much.
Beware Mr Weightman’s attentions, I fear he’s a satyr,
dances and sings at the least provocation,
leaps tussocks, balances on field walls,
bringing hot flushes to our little Anne
who’s scarce out of the schoolroom.
Nor is he above ogling between sermons
half the lasses of Haworth.’
Anne is struggling with German.
(I think there is nothing she will not attempt).
‘was hast du gestern gelesen?’
she demands of a mournful cow
who unsurprisingly answers her not.
She means to discuss Goethe with Emmy.
In a moment the two will go off together,
lie on the sward of this brief summer,
chew grass stalks and smell the earth
which is already in love with them both.
Lewis Hosegood
Heathcliff
Today she dreamed a man, delineated with her pen.
Before the ink was dry his eyelids lifted
and his black eyes shone.
She saw how she had stirred his heart.
His essence issues from the wind,
familiars; shadows, briars, the precipice.
His foot’s a hoof.
His heartbeat comes within the body of a hawk.
Pen, paper, ink and thought have caught him,
tied him into words; a wretched animal,
enraged and cast within a trap.
And she, a wrist that rubs against a broken pane of glass,
and says the spirit’s gist is also warm at last.
She dreams too fast,
and spirit touches flesh too much and cymbals clash,
and love is dashed, and roars the moor,
a hound possessed, a fiend,
its bloody gore a savageness she rides.
And the hawk’s beak strives
to peck the eyes of pain.
It scales the cliff.
What need of flesh? Her spirit soars!
The owl screeches, and the night falls fast.
Curtainless, her window points the way to stars.
They too are rooted into rock, and gleam
an otherness, that seems like love.
Wendy Bardsley
Charlotte Brontë’s Grave
All overgrown by cunning moss,
All interspersed with weed,
The little cage of ‘Currer Bell’
In quiet ‘Haworth’ laid.
This bird – observing others
When frost too sharp became
Retire to other latitudes –
Quietly did the same -.
But different in returning –
Since Yorkshire hills are green –
Yet not all in the nests I meet –
Can Nightingale be seen –
Or –
Gathering from many wanderings –
Gethsemane can tell
Thro’ what transporting anguish
She reached the Asphodel!
Soft fall the sounds of Eden
Upon her puzzled ear –
Oh what an afternoon for Heaven,
When ‘Brontë’ entered there!
Emily Dickinson
AN ENDURING FLAME
What others have said of this volume
“A beautifully produced anthology … it will appeal on many accounts: for Simon Warner’s superb photography, for many inspirational poems, for a re-telling of the Brontë story, and for seeing how others more sensitive and articulate than us see the familiar things with a different head.”
Brontë Society Transactions
“It’s hard to see how the magic [of the Brontës’ Haworth] could be better pinned down than in this book’s combination of the words of contemporary poets, those of the Brontës themselves, and Simon Warner’s atmospheric photographs.”
Adrian Henri
“This anthology is generous and surprising, whilst Simon Warner’s brilliant photographs tug us to the home truths of the place.”
U A Fanthorpe