Death

Death was something that plagued Emily Brontë throughout her entire life. She lost her mother to cancer at the age of three, then lost two of her older sisters (Maria and Elizabeth) to tuberculosis at the age of seven. Sickness continued to afflict her family, and Emily herself would die from tuberculosis at thirty, less than three months after her beloved elder brother Branwell had succumbed to the same disease. With the spectre of death looming so large in her personal life, it is of little surprise “No Coward Soul Is Mine” seeks to rationalize and reclaim death through the power of faith.

In the last two stanzas, the speaker lays out her reasoning as to why, though death can decimate anything belonging to the physical realms, it holds no power over the divine. Anything imbued with the spirit of God “may never be destroyed,” the speaker claims. Thus, while the mortal body may die, a person’s immortal soul must necessarily live on, since God is their “Being and Breath.” It is this knowledge that allows the speaker’s soul to resist cowardice before “the world’s storm-troubled sphere”; she is secure in her belief that whatever befalls her mortal body will have little consequence for the piece of divinity that lives on “within [her] breast."

Protestantism 

By the lifetime of Emily Brontë, the official state religion of England had been protestant for some centuries. Religion was a formative aspect of the Brontë sisters’ lives, since their father was employed as a perpetual curate in the United Church of England and Ireland for much of their childhood and adolescence. Protestant ideology permeates “No Coward Soul Is Mine,” appearing first in the second stanza of the poem and continuing through its conclusion.

When the speaker directly addresses God in the first line of the second stanza, she attaches the epithet “within my breast” to declare a personal and intimate relationship with God. This is distinct from the traditional Catholic view of God at the time, which broadly posited that people are not able to have an individual relationship with God but must rely on the clergy to act as an intermediary between themselves and the divine. The protestant belief in intimacy with the divine is only expanded by the speaker’s claim that the life that lives within her is a facet of the “Undying Life” that lives within God. Through this declaration, the speaker suggests not only that she is able to communicate directly with the divine but that the essence of God is imbued in her very being.

The poem’s meditations on organized religion become explicit in stanza three, where the speaker denounces “the thousand creeds / That move men’s hearts” as “unutterably vain.” Although creed can be taken more broadly to denote a set of beliefs or principles that guide men’s lives, such as the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure, “creed” as used here likely refers to an organized system of belief or faith. This, combined with the repetitious description of such creeds as vain, may allude to the excessive wealth and opulence of the Catholic church, which was viewed by many protestants as a corrupting influence. Indeed, the increasing affluence of the Catholic church and its increasing reliance on physical representations of wealth—such as highly gilded altars—were two of the primary complaints levied against the church during the Protestant reformation. Thus, “No Coward Soul Is Mine” can be read as a deeply Protestant text due to its intimate portrayal of the speaker’s relationship with God and its expression of nature itself as an object of worship rather than physical objects...