I Know Not How It Falls on Me

I Know Not How It Falls on Me

I KNOW not how it falls on me,

This summer evening, hushed and lone;

Yet the faint wind comes soothingly

With something of an olden tone.

Forgive me if I've shunned so long

Your gentle greeting, earth and air!

But sorrow withers e'en the strong,

And who can fight against despair

Emily Brontė(1818 - 1848)

In 1826 their father brought a box of wooden soldiers, and each child chose a soldier and gave him a name and character: these were to be the foundation of the creation of a complicated fantasy world, which the Brontės actively worked on for 16 years. She had two sisters Charlotte and Anne and along with stunning imaginations, which transmuted their childhood, they created a hundred tiny written volumes beginning sometime in 1829. While their kingdom of Agria flourished nothing of the saga the of Gondal chronicles survived; of Emily's work there is only her poetry, a most passionate poetry written from the perspectives of the inhabitants of Gondal. For Emily, it seems that the fantastic adventures in an imaginary Gondal coexisted on almost an equal level of importance and reality with the lonely and mundane world of household chores and her walks on the moor.

Her most astonishing achievement is her novel Wuthering Heights, a story of passionate love in which irreconcilable principles of energy and calm are finally harmonized. Emily was a mystic and most of her poetry dramatizes her intuitive apprehension of the nature of life. Most of her poetry remained obscure in light of her famous novel and it wasn't until Fannie E. Ratchford's The Brontės Web of Childhood explored the significance of her art and the Gondal saga from her childhood. Her poems and their relationship of these to Wuthering Heights suddenly became of great interest to scholars and people began to study her poetry for the imaginary kingdom of Gondal dicovering that the scenery in both Wuthering Heights and her poerty echoed the same elements.

I Know Not How It Falls on Me (1831) is a reflection by Emily from her safe haven of Gondel, one were she is torn between a faith in nature expressed from a pensive mood of regret for having been overcome with melancholy unable to see the beauty in life. One would be mistaken, however, to conclude that the poetic beauty of Gondal was essentially different from that which Emily saw in the world around her. Passion is in no way inconsistent with empty moors, cold winters, and brown hills.

Sources:

Bram, Robert Philips, Norma H. Dicky, "Bronte", Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia , 1988.

Kate E. Brown - Beloved Objects: Mourning, Materiality...:
www.metrostate.edu/cgi-bin/troxy/lproxy.cgi/URL-muse.jhu.edu/ journals/elh/v065/65.2brown.html

Public domain text taken from The Poets' Corner:
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/2000/b/ebronte52.html

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