As a retired English teacher who has taught Emily Bronte, I mused on her life and work after watching this dramatization on TV.-Ron in Tasmania
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GRADUALLY AND HALTINGLY

From 1837 to 1848 Emily Bronte, the author of the famous novel Wuthering Heights, wrote a collection of poetry known as 'the Gondal Poems.' These poems were peopled with heroes and heroines. They tell of the life of the imagination, the place of her retreat. These poems were a hymn to the imagination, to her private world. It was a world where she expressed a vision of the essential oneness of life. It was a vision, too, that came to find its apotheosis in Wuthering Heights. It was a vision gradually and haltingly articulated of a radiant world "marred by her growing awareness of humanity's misery." These years were a decade, for Bronte, in which the unity of the individual with the universe formed the basis for her intuitive sense of humankind's oneness.-Ron Price with thanks to Winifred Gerin, Emily Bronte, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, pp.144-154.

Your vision, too, was one of death
to which we all advanced
with those wild-eyed charioteers,
our day-to-day hours,
drawing us to be with those we love,
undivided, all and only one--beyond the veil,
where finally the sleep our lifted in eternity.

Your vision, too, brooding as it was
on the nature of things,
had a converse with angels,
holy, heavenly, surely a leaven
that leavened your world of being
and furnished the power
through which your art manifested.1

1 due in part, at least, to the new forces emerging in the world in the 1840s. Perhaps Bronte experienced what the Bab had prayed for during these years; namely, for that which will bring comfort to their minds, will rejoice their inner beings, will impart assurance to their hearts.(The Bab, Selections, 1976 p.179.)
1 there is no question, too, of the great power released into the world in the 1840s: all the world's which the Almighty hath created benefited through the power released by the Babi martyrs of the 1840s.(Gleanings, p.161)

Ron Price
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INTENSELY

Emily Bronte seems to have been determined that her life should come under the category of “uneventful”....because she was intensely taken up with her own particular calling of life....To the end, she caused very little to happen to herself by her own agency.....The result of this compressed, instinctive discipline, was....her novel, Wuthering Heights.....It may be that Emily did not herself realize her own nature until she had produced Wuthering Heights. -Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, Emily Bronte: Her Life and Work, Peter Owen, London, 1966, pp.11-13.

Having been intensely taken up with writing poetry
and intensely taken up with other callings, I have
compressed this instinctive discipline into some
precious moments, intensely, intensely, and life
uneventul, uneventful--beyond the callings because
you can only do so much and put yourself into so
many places when it’s all so intensely, intensely.

So I keep it all down, down, quiet, quiet after the
long runs, the dartings, the endless talk fests, the
dieing and the blowing, so I can find the world
within this world, disengage my inner self, reflect,
at every moment, new splendours from the Sun of Truth
and, undistracted, be wholly absorbed in the emanations
of the spirit* at the centre of this slowly realized intensity.

Ron PriceFor: Fanpop on: 2/11/09

* ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Haifa, 1978, p.192.
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