From Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac”:
It’s the birthday of the novelist Emily Brontë, born in Thornton, England (1818). Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights (1847), considered one of the greatest love stories of all time, but she never had a lover. She and her sisters Anne and Charlotte and their brother Branwell educated themselves at home by reading their father’s large collection of classic literature. They invented elaborate fantasy kingdoms and filled notebooks with the history and inhabitants of these places. Emily was the most reserved of the children.
Emily is most famous for Wuthering Heights, but she also wrote poetry; and when her sister Charlotte discovered some of Emily’s poems, she said: “Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me — a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, not at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear, they had also a peculiar music — wild, melancholy, and elevating.” In 1836, Charlotte — who was the most outgoing and confident of the sisters — decided to publish their poetry, but she figured it wouldn’t sell if they used their real names, so she gave them all male names, and Poems by Currier, Ellis and Acton Bell was published in 1846. Wuthering Heights came out in 1847, and a year later, Emily died of tuberculosis at age 30, standing in the living room of her family’s parsonage.
I’m sorry about Emily, but I can’t get over the image of her dying while standing. Is that possible?
Here’s the best source I found about standing deaths. It seems it is possible to die standing up and stay in that position but it is very unusual.
https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2012/08/28/standing-death/
She died while standing meaning she fell dead while trying to stand up. An 1883 biography, Emily Brontë, by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson: “Towards two o’clock her sisters begged her, in an agony, to let them put her to bed. “No, no,” she cried; tormented with the feverish restlessness that comes before the last, most quiet peace. She tried to rise, leaning with one hand upon the sofa. And thus the chord of life snapped. She was dead.”
LCT,
Now I understand how Emily Bronte died while standing. Thank you!
She lived while on a bench
But standing up she died
The woman was a mensch
And poems edified
She lived while on a log
But getting up, she croaked
Like bellowwing of frog
Her final word was spoke
Interesting, good way to go.
Better to die and stand for something than to live and stand for nothing.
That’s what Emily always said.
Better to die
And stand for aught
Than live a lie
And stand for naught
Bronte’s Allegory
She lived while sitting down
And died while on the rise
The moral is that ground
Is safer than the skies
LOL!
Are you sure she was sitting on the ground and not a couch or chair? :o)
She lived while on the couch
And died while on the rise
The moral is that crouch
Is safer than the skies
She lived while in a seat
But died while on the rise
The moral: “off your feet
Is safer”, I surmise
No.
“On your seat” is safer.
“On the rise” is deadly.
She lived while in recliner
But died when standing up
She never was a whiner
No, Emily was tough
She lived while in a rocker
But standing up, she died
And Bronte was a talker
At end “No, no” she cried
Ok, I’ll stop now.
Gotta have some respect for the dead poets.
Imagine how many poems you would have to write to cover everything she could have been sitting on before she stood and died?
I would be lucky indeed if after I die, Some(other)DAM Poet writes goofy ditties about my death.
I lies. One more
She lived while in her bed
But died while getting up
No matter what she said
The getting up is tough
That should pretty much cover the possibilities
Emily Bronte would be delighted to see how you have memorialized her standing death.
“The Sign you have made it as a poet”
The sign that folks approve
Of poet when she’s dead
Is if they are so moved
To write about her bed
She lived while on a horse
But standing up, she passed
Cuz horse was tall, of course
And fall was very last
I’m using my poetic license.
Lloyd and Poet, you together are like the comic relief in Hamlet.
What a breathtaking, ground-breaking book!!!!! How many novels and Hollywood movies since then are just pallid imitations of her work of genius!!!! Still an RIVETING read today.
I reread it again last year. Wow. Breathtaking. A deep, disturbing psychological thriller, with vivid, iconic characters; a plot that keeps a reader on the edge of his or her chair; and themes that appeal powerfully to our most primary emotions.
To any reader of this post who hasn’t read this amazing book yet, here, a teaser:
And what was it that had suggested the tremendous tumult? . . . Merely the branch of a fir-tree that touched my lattice as the blast wailed by, and rattled its dry cones against the panes! I listened doubtingly an instant; detected the disturber, then turned and dozed, and dreamt again: if possible, still more disagreeably than before.
This time, I remembered I was lying in the oak closet [bedroom], and I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow; I heard, also, the fir bough repeat its teasing sound, and ascribed it to the right cause: but it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it, if possible; and, I thought, I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple: a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten.
‘I must stop it, nevertheless!’ I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!
The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed,
‘Let me in—let me in!’
‘Who are you?’ I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself.
‘Catherine Linton,’ it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton) ‘I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!’
As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.
‘How can I!’ I said at length. ‘Let me go, if you want me to let you in!’
The fingers relaxed, I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer.
I seemed to keep them closed above a quarter of an hour; yet, the instant I listened again, there was the doleful cry moaning on!
‘Begone!’ I shouted. ‘I’ll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years.’
‘It is twenty years,’ mourned the voice: ‘twenty years. I’ve been a waif for twenty years!’
Thereat began a feeble scratching outside, and the pile of books moved as if thrust forward.
The 1847 timing of the release of Wuthering Heights places it in the midst of revolutionary Europe. I had not recalled when it came out. The following year Communist Manifesto was published. Wagner wrote Longerhein. A truly revolutionary period.
Tumultuous times. Think of the distance traveled between this quintessential Romantic novel and, say, Joyce’s Ulysses, 1922! In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy’s narrator comments that there might as well have been many hundreds of years between Tess and her mother. Same is true in the U.S. today. We have a lot of places that time has forgotten.
“Turning the police into an instrument of Executive Power domestically is the classic fascist play.”
I think Trump already attempted to turn the military into his own instrument of evil when he walked across the street from the White House for his Bible photo up at that church, but that failed.
“Nation’s top military officer apologizes for role in Trump photo op outside church: ‘I should not have been there’
“My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” Milley said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/i-should-not-have-been-there-milley-apologizes-role-trump-n1229876
Milley also told National Guard troops that Trump called in that they would not engage with the civilians but treat them gently.
After that, Trump had Barr recruit, hand-picked, unmarked thugs from federal law enforcement agencies that were used in Washington DC and in Portland.
Does Trump and/or Barr realize that if federal law enforcement agencies became the tool used to enforce their fascist policies, the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, and Air Force might eventually use U.S. troops to stop Trump’s thugs from hurting citizens that are peacefully practicing their 1st Amendment rights?
The annual Military Times poll shows that 70 percent or more of the officers in the U.S. Military do not approve of Trump, and the Oath that those officers took when they were commissioned does not say they have to obey the president.
If Trump orders his federal thugs to stop citizens from exercising their 1st Amendment rights, that is a direct attack on the U.S. Constitution. Then the military has the legal right to step in and stop Trump and even use force to defend the 1st Amendment from Trump and his administration.
“I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. (Title 5 U.S. Code 3331, an individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services)”
https://www.army.mil/values/officers.html
Lloyd,
Thank you.
So true!
the “dump” and “barred” never served anyone or any country a day in their lives.
Sending your comments to my cousin, who’s also a Veteran and “a lifer.”
He likes your comments.