Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Poets and Poems: Emily Brontë and “The Night is Darkening Round Me”

By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Blue bayou Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë was more than the author of Wuthering Heights. She was an accomplished poet

Thanks to Fyodor Dostoevsky, I discovered Emily Brontë the poet.

I was in the gift shop of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church at Trafalgar Square. We’d eaten lunch at what we consider “home base” in London — the Crypt of St. Martin’s, a café and often a venue for jazz combos and other musical events. Next to the Crypt is the church’s gift shop, with a wide array of merchandise designed to appeal (tastefully) to tourists. Like us.

I was moseying around a table which featured, among other things, a small display of Penguin Little Black Classics. Penguin publishes some 80 and counting of these little gems — long short stories, poetry chapbooks, long poems, and other short works by classic authors. My eye went to White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky, primarily because I was unfamiliar with it. Next to it was a book with a fascinating title — The Night is Darkening Round Me by Emily Brontë.

Brontë (1818-1848) is, of course, the author of Wuthering Heights. I read it in high school and college, and I still retain images of the brooding Heathcliff, wandering the moors of northern England. I saw The Night is Darkening Round Me, and I assumed it must be an excerpt from the novel.

Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë

I was wrong. It was a collection of Brontë’s poetry, taken from a larger collection published in 1992. My surprise betrayed my ignorance. Emily Brontë was a poet, too? As it turns out, in her short life, she was a poet before, while, and after she was a novelist. In 1846, with her sisters Charlotte and Anne, she published a collection simply entitled Poems, the authors identified as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It sold two copies (most contemporary poets will sympathize). Emily had 21 poems in the collection; in her lifetime, she wrote nearly 200.

Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, and it became her signature work. Nearly a century passed before her poems were collected and published (in 1942 wartime Britain). In 1992, Penguin published The Complete Poems, which included both completed poems and some fragments or uncompleted poems. The Night is Darkening Round Me includes 24 complete poems and six uncompleted poems, functioning as a kind of Brontë chapbook. It’s difficult to read the poems and not see the title as a collective premonition of her early death.

The poems are beautifully written, covering topics as diverse as imagination, a daydream, the shining sun, memory … and death. Death is an especially strong theme, and it’s not surprising. Nineteenth century Britons were far more familiar with death than their 21st century descendants. Infant mortality was common; 25 percent of children died before the age of five. Average life expectancy was 42. The Brontë family was especially hard hit. Emily and brother Branwell died in 1848 at 30 and 31, respectively. Anne died at 29, and Charlotte lived to only 38. Officially, the cause for all four was believed to be tuberculosis, but later groundwater investigations showed they may have been drinking contaminated water.

One poem in the collection that is about death is, appropriately enough, also about hope. And yet it is a negative perspective. Hope is timid, cruel, oblivious, often false, and definitely unreliable.

Hope

The Night is Darkening Round Me Emily Brontë Hope was but a timid friend-
She sat without my grated den
Watching how my fate would tend
Even as selfish-hearted men.

She was cruel in her fear.
Through the bars, one dreary day,
I looked out to see her there
And she turned her face away!

Like a false guard false watch keeping
Still in strife she whispered peace;
She would sing while I was weeping,
If I listened, she would cease.

False she was, and unrelenting.
When my last joys strewed the ground
Even sorrow saw repenting
Those sad relics scattered round;

Hope – whose whisper would have given
Balm to all that frenzied pain –
Stretched her wings and soared to heaven;
Went – and ne’er returned again!

Finding The Night is Darkening Round Me in the gift shop turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. At a young age, Emily Brontë was an accomplished poet who just happened to write a novel that became her major literary legacy. But to read her poems is to understand at least some of the origins and influences that created Wuthering Heights. (And a belated thanks to Mr. Dostoevsky.)

Photo by Matt Deavenport, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan

5 star

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • A History of Children’s Stories: “The Haunted Wood” by Sam Leith - May 20, 2025
  • World War II Had Its Poets, Too - May 15, 2025
  • Czeslaw Milosz, 1946-1953: “Poet in the New World” - May 13, 2025

Filed Under: article, book reviews, Books, Emily Brontë, Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, Poets

Try Every Day Poems...

Comments

  1. Bethany says

    May 22, 2024 at 11:43 am

    “I looked out to see her there
    And she turned her face away!”

    What tragedies she endured. Thank you for pointing out her poetry to us.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy