O speak of liberty,/ O tell me of my mountain home

Poet Carol Rumens has chosen Anne Brontë's The North Wind as The Guardian's Poem of the week and she discusses it at length.

The North Wind, one of the “Gondal poems” by Anne Brontë (1820-1849), concerns the imprisoned Alexandrina Zenobia, a character Anne is said to have based on the archaeologist and explorer, Lady Hester Stanhope. Alexandrina in her dungeon is visited by the North Wind who has been sent, it explains “[t]o mourn and sigh with thee/ And tell thee of the cherished land/ Of thy nativity.”

Like other Gondal poems by both the sisters, it inhabits the conventions of the romantic adventure-story genre in a free-spirited, independent manner, also reaching beyond our contemporary stereotype of the Brontë “story”. Perhaps it owes the breath of authenticity to the conflicts in the children’s personal experience, not least the difference between the freedoms of the surrounding moorland and the more tightly controlled – and motherless – family interior of the Haworth parsonage. The North Wind, paradoxically a force of loving warmth, dispatched by Heaven to comfort the prisoner, is perhaps a figure for the lost mother as well as the untamed landscape.

It gives voice to the prisoner’s own memories of her native Northern mountains as if sharing her identity. Sometimes, it pours out a torrent of adjectives. Oddly, the effect is positive, perhaps because the sonorities are varied but melodious, and the enumerated qualities subtly contrasted. The mountains are “[s]till lonely, wild, majestic, bleak and drear,/ And stern and lovely, as they used to be// When thou a young enthusiast,/ As wild and free as they// O’er rocks and glens and snowy heights/ Didst often love to stray.”

Alexandrina begins the poem with a moment of dramatic recognition, so that we immediately hear the first of the two voices and recognise the oral nature of the composition. The orality is underlined by the supple free-range rhythmic movement, and the variety of stanza structure and metre. As a poem, The North Wind is a kind of Ode – one with two singers. Perhaps Anne had read Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind (published in 1820) and decided a less compact and formal style than Shelley’s would best embody the North Wind’s declamations, although she may be sounding her own political note when the prisoner commands the wind, “O speak of liberty”. “Liberty” is a term, after all, that implies something more humanly pertinent than the freedom of the mountains.

In the fifth stanza, the prisoner replies to the North Wind, launching a psychological insight impressive for an 18-year-old writer. Though “sad and drear,” the wind’s voice, says the prisoner, is nothing to the “gloomy silence” she has had to endure: in fact, she prefers the arousal of painful emotions and “hot tears” to the “stupor of despair”. The unexpected off-rhyme of “silence” with “voice” is eloquent. Again, there’s a suggestion that lived experience authenticates the insight and the tone.

Christianity Today discusses problematic bits of classic texts.

One excellent example is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, written from the perspective of Bertha, the woman in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—who is described only through her unhappy husband Rochester’s words as being born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and having Creole heritage.

In holding a microphone to Bertha’s voice, Rhys, as a colonized woman herself, reshapes the very narrative of Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea shows that classic literature is not static but alive.

Joseph S. Walker calls Rhys’s retelling a “re-vision” that “changes the nature and possible readings” of the classic work because it “speaks from the margin, and in so doing changes the center.” (Sara Kyoungah White)