Emily Bronte is best known, perhaps solely known to many, as a novelist, the author of one of the all-time great works, Wuthering Heights.  Readers for generations have paused at Lockwood’s final thoughts at the graves of Catherine, Edgar, and Heathcliff, with the wistful feeling that accompanies the end of a close relationship.  Eager to read something else that Emily Brontё wrote, one learns that she was a poet.  The novelists who also were great poets are very few.  Emily Bronte deserves the distinction of being both.

One should read and consider her poems several times.  Like songs or great art they only improve on better acquaintance.  Then, once her poems become very familiar, one can come back to them again and again because poems are for perpetual reading, like a spiritual source.  The sentiments and language of Bronte’s poems, on topics that touch everyone’s life at some time or other, are too good to be overlooked–and it is virtually all that we have of her to read after putting down Wuthering Heights for the third time.