[In the following essay, Collins undertakes a close examination of Brontë as a poet, considering his publishing history, relationships with his sisters (particularly Emily), poetic influences, and primary themes and characters.]

Many men write their own epitaph, but few have damned themselves as effectively in doing so as did Branwell Brontë. Consider one of his last surviving notes, written to his life-long friend and sometime custodian, John Brown:

Dear John

I shall feel very much obliged to you if you can contrive to give me Five pence worth of Gin in a proper measure.

Should it be speedily got I could perhaps take it from you or Billy [William Brown] at the lane top, or, what would be quite as well, sent out for, to you.

I anxiously ask the favour because I know the good it will do me.

Punctually at Half-past Nine in the morning you will be paid the 5d out of a shilling given me then.

Yours, P. B. B.¹

When put into words, one man's agony quickly becomes his contemptible folly in the eyes of others. How could the dying Branwell Brontë have known that his desperate plea, surreptitiously scrawled to his father's sexton, would somehow survive to blacken him for almost a hundred and forty years after, while the sheaves of imaginative narrative and poetry to which he devoted half of his life would remain almost utterly unread? In happier days, he certainly could not have anticipated that his death-bed cry, the last words uttered to that same staunch friend—“In all my past life I have done nothing either great or good”²—would be seized upon as definitive. And perhaps most bitter, most tragic of all the events of that period surrounding his death would have been, had he known it, the rough justice meted out to him by the pen of the sister who had for many years been his accomplice in the creation of a vast mythic world which in some ways seemed to rival that of the forging of the modern British Empire itself. Ironically, it is Charlotte who would engrave in literary history most clearly the shame of his last few years.

At the age of 32, Charlotte Brontë had just arrived herself at the threshold of fame through her first published novel, after almost two decades of writing, much of it in collaboration with Branwell. By some reports, she had not spoken to her younger brother for two years before that Sunday morning, September 24, 1848, when she stood with her father and two sisters at the bed where the emaciated body lay, his agony finally—but abruptly, too—ended. The official death certificate would read “chronic bronchitis,” reminding us of the consumption that was already eating at Emily—it was only two days later that she took a walk outside the house for the last time—and Anne who would survive the winter but never see another summer. A secondary cause of death for Branwell was certified as “marasmus,” or a generalized wasting away of the flesh. However, Charlotte's elliptical diagnoses, written in a succession of letters just after Branwell's burial to her publisher, W. S. Williams, of Smith and Elder, are better known to us. Implied is a certain divine retribution, the wages of sin, a cold pity that is more suggestive of the harsh resentment of Lucy Snowe than of the angelic Helen Burns. “My poor father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters, and much and long as he had suffered on his account, he cried out for his loss like David for that of Absalom—my son!—my son!” (Gérin, p. 298). Certainly there is a resentment here against a favored brother that goes beyond the grave. Just four days after the burial, she writes a long and bitter account of what Branwell meant to her at that moment. Although she speaks of “us,” one may reasonably doubt that Emily or Anne saw it; her father obviously would not have concurred:

It is not permitted us to grieve for him who is gone as others grieve for those they lose. The removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather in the light of a mercy than a chastisement. Branwell was his father's and his sisters' pride and hope in boyhood, but since manhood the case has been otherwise. It has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent; … to know the sickness of hope deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled; to experience despair at last—and now to behold the sudden early obscure close of what might have been a noble career.

I do not weep from a sense of bereavement—there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost—but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior. I had aspirations and ambitions for him once, long ago—they have perished mournfully. Nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings. There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death, such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe.

(Gérin, pp. 298-299)

“Nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings”—it was Charlotte that she mourned for. However, the judgment of Charlotte was the sentence of death upon Branwell's reputation. For many, it was sealed with the moral imprint that she added:

When I looked on the noble face and forehead of my dead brother (nature had favoured him with a fairer outside, as well as a finer constitution, than his sisters) and asked myself what had made him go ever wrong … I seemed to receive an oppressive revelation of the feebleness of humanity—of the inadequacy of even genius to lead to true greatness if unaided by religion and principle.

(Gérin, p. 299)

(Apparently Charlotte never asked the same questions of Byron and Shelley and her own Angrian characters, although she uneasily came down on somewhat similar grounds against Emily's characterization of Heathcliff in her Introduction to the posthumous 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights.) In any event, there we have it, the continuing literary reputation of Branwell, the unprincipled degenerate brother of the movie portrayals, the necessary foil to the sisters as writers of genius, as culture heroines.³ This has been Branwell's fate, and some of the best of the Brontë scholars have certified it. We have been told over and over that he is the model for Arthur Huntington of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the weak and vicious Hindley Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, negative exemplary portraits drawn by Anne and Emily who so join Charlotte in her condemnation (although years earlier Branwell himself drew similar degenerate figures as lost souls). That splendid pioneer scholar of the Brontë “Juvenilia,” in which most of Branwell's surviving manuscripts lie, Fanny Ratchford, could scarcely mention his name without charring it in the fierce heat of her scorn.⁴ Nonetheless the deadbeat, weak-willed brother, the only villain readily available in that feminist-oriented life drama of the Brontës which seems to hold as much interest for us as do the novels, this drink-cadging alcoholic was the author of hundreds of thousands of words, chronicles of war and love and egoism that sometimes have an astonishing vitality when one penetrates the microscopic form in which they were committed to paper. His total output, beginning when he was about fourteen but mounting to a crescendo between his eighteenth and twenty-fourth years, probably exceeds the published work of his sisters. Moreover, as a youthful writer, he was at times a better one than Charlotte, who could be awkward, mawkish, and silly in her Angrian tales in ways from which he was preserved by his own particular interests. By the age of fourteen or fifteen he had acquired a certain measure of that mastery of words which assures that a thing will be well-said even if not wisely said. He was, in short, a poet.

Much of the actual verse was embedded in long chronicles of the private and public lives of the renegade heroes of Angria, particularly that of Alexander Percy, also known as Rogue, Earl of Northangerland, Lord Elrington—a figure with as many titles as the actual Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, the namesake of and inspiration for Charlotte's principal literary character over the years. Percy, or Northangerland as he is more often called after his earlier days, is the archetype of the Rebel, anarchy in human form, his personality drawn even more closely from Milton's Lucifer than from the Byronic model so commonly identified in late Romantic writings. He is ruthless and amoral, an atheist, seducer, and leader of desperate men in a constant search for unrestricted freedom. “Liberty” is his rallying cry, intrigue his compulsion, destruction his achievement.

And yet he is sensitive and tender, a passionate musician, a man who recognizes that the enemy he most envies and hates is the man he most admires and loves. Throughout his life—and Branwell chronicles a great deal of it—his person and character, alternately tender and fierce, are magnetic to women, and he in turn is devoted to them. In particular, his second wife, Mary, embodies all that he then holds dear; and while he was proudly independent before, after her death his agony leads him to a violent despair. “Evil, be thou my good” is essentially what emerges. In that world of the mind where we all spend much of our lives, Branwell Brontë had created not a simple alter ego, but a reality for which the actual world became a poor substitute. It was a reality that he shaped all through the 1830s and which, essentially, he himself moved into in the 1840s when in letters to friends he began signing himself as “Northangerland” and when his pencil sketches of Alexander Percy become a series of self-portraits from youth to the dissolute middle-age that Branwell himself never lived to match. This is the subject matter, attitudes and emotions of which his poetry is made up, and now almost a century and a half after his death, this poetry is for the first time generally available to readers in Tom Winnifrith's valuable edition, The Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë (New York Univ. Press, 1983), 339 pp.

The prior publishing history of this fourth Brontë is quickly told. A half-dozen or so of his poems were printed in newspapers in Leeds and nearby Halifax while he was in his mid-twenties—making him, incidentally, the first Brontë other than his father to appear in print. A series of tactless attempts to make it into Blackwood's failed, probably as much because of his covering letters as anything else. (Ironically, in an omnibus volume from the files of Blackwood's, published by Mrs. Oliphant at the end of the nineteenth century, Branwell's unreturned submissions were exhumed and printed.) With his death, followed in quick succession by that of his sisters, the surviving manuscripts passed to his father—who with very poor eyesight and in his eighties probably could not have read very extensively in them—to Charlotte's husband, Arthur Bell Nichols, who took them back to Ireland with him. Meanwhile, Francis Leyland, brother of John Leyland, the sculptor and close friend of Branwell, who himself had known Branwell and regarded him with the friendly sympathy that Branwell seems to have engendered in all of his personal friends, wrote The Brontë Family, with Special Reference to Patrick Branwell Brontë (London, 1886), in which he printed several specimens of Branwell's poetry, apparently from his brother's papers and from newspaper files. A half century after Branwell's death, the Brontë manuscripts in Ireland passed into the hands of T. J. Wise, now regarded as a very questionable custodian of the Brontë manuscript treasures. Given the fact that much of Branwell's writing was extremely difficult to read and that the sisters' work was much more highly regarded because of their successful publication, it is logical to assume that Branwell's portion of the bundle of manuscript would not have attracted too many eyes in that half century of limbo. However, given also the facts that Branwell was the black sheep, that his minute writing would be as much provocative as daunting to members of his family if not others, and that a reader quickly finds such elements as religious skepticism and moral indifference, it seems inevitable that Charlotte, in the half-dozen years that she survived Branwell, that Patrick Brontë subsequently, and Arthur Bell Nichols after that, all read in the manuscripts. Moreover, it is probable that some—perhaps a great many—of Branwell's writings were tossed into the fireplace in what only could have been seen as an act of concern for Branwell's posthumous reputation by his sister, his father, and his brother-in-law, none of whom at the time would in any measure have shared his moral and religious views. While the fragmentary and scattered nature of the manuscripts can in part be explained by T. J. Wise's piecemeal disposition of the papers at the turn of the century, logic dictates that some considerable part—both better and worse in quality, perhaps—has vanished forever.

In 1910, Clement K. Shorter edited and published The Poems of Emily Brontë, including many that were actually Branwell's, as we now know. (Their handwriting can sometimes be mistaken one for the other; also, some later transcriptions by Emily of poems earlier written by Branwell and dated at places such as Bradford, when he was there and she was not and involving incidents from his experience, indicate the interfusion of the writings of the Brontës at various times.) T. J. Wise published a few copies of some of the prose for himself and friends, and in 1924 the truncated manuscript of Branwell's final “novel,” And the Weary Are at Rest, was published privately in an edition of fifty copies, leaving the work for all practical purpose still inaccessible. At about the same time, John Drinkwater published a few copies of Branwell's Translations from Horace (work that has been praised from Hartley Coleridge down to the present editor, Tom Winnifrith, who unfortunately does not include it). Branwell's literary life thus remained one of private editions by readers who encountered him in manuscript. Then, in the early 1930s, the ambitious nineteen-volume Shakespeare Head edition of the Brontës appeared, which included three volumes of some—but not all—of Charlotte and Branwell's poetry and Juvenilia. However, much of the latter is virtually unedited, such as photostats of manuscripts of Branwell's prose that, as presented, are illegible, and the like. Moreover, the Shakespeare Head Brontë itself came out in an edition of only one thousand copies, with those surviving now in the rare book category, available in only a few libraries. While some of the volumes have been reprinted, those with Branwell's work have not been reissued, up to the present time.

Winnifrith's The Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë carries as a subtitle, “A New Annotated and Enlarged Edition of the Shakespeare Head Brontë.” However, it is a book that resembles its parent very little, and that is all to the good. While “for reasons of economy,” Winnifrith reprints the Shakespeare Head version of poems as they were originally printed in that edition, he makes some corrections and records variations in the notes. This forms approximately two-thirds of the book. A second section is devoted to a series of poems that Branwell had, in 1837, copied out in a notebook from the Angrian prose narratives for which they had originally been written. Virtually none of these had been included by Symington and Wise in the Shakespeare Head volume entitled The Poems of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë though some had been included in the grab-bag Miscellaneous and Unpublished volumes. Winnifrith edits and prints this entire notebook since, as he says, it suggests “Branwell's own distinction between poetry on one hand and Angria on the other.” A brief (20-page) third section is made up of “other poems” not previously published in the Shakespeare Head edition. To quote Winnifrith: “I am aware that this section may seem scrappy, consisting of some good poems which the Shakespeare Head unaccountably missed, some fragments and some poems which might possibly count as variants.”

In effect, then, this edition is of major importance because it makes generally available to us the bulk of the poetry, work which has been read by very few since it was written by a poet who died before Wordsworth did. It is in some ways, then, a belated work, with little scholarship to build upon and by the editor's own admission leaving much to be done as Branwell's prose manuscripts become available and as the work is brought together in more comprehensive form. However, it gives us at last a chance to consider the fourth Brontë as a poet, if not yet as a writer of fiction.⁵

“Branwell was the second best poet in the Brontë family,” says the editor of this present edition. In saying this, Winnifrith means no great praise, for on the whole he cautiously follows the traditional wisdom that Branwell was a lazy fellow who “never produced any major work.” (In some ways, one wishes that a few modern writers would follow in the path of Branwell's generous contemporaries; those who knew him personally, such as Francis Leyland, William Deardon, Francis Grundy, and others spoke of him afterwards in warm and admiring terms.) But Winnifrith does claim that “some of his poems are worth studying in their own right,” apart from the powerful influence that he obviously exercised on the minds of his three sisters in what was a very close and prolonged relationship with each at different times.

By all accounts the last with whom he was close—although neither wrote diary entries at the time—was Emily, in that crucial period after Thorp Green when she is said to have stayed up late at night to help Branwell up the staircase when he lurched home in that final drowning of his troubles in alcoholic suicide. The least moralizing of the sisters, she appears in every sense to have been the most tolerant and best-natured. That Branwell's poetry bears comparison with hers is somehow appropriate, for while she was far tougher than he was, their temperaments clearly were founded on a similar desire for freedom which colored everything they wrote. In contrast, Charlotte's bent was toward an indomitable integrity; Anne's, toward a life based on personal principle.

For both, their poetry was a by-product of their Juvenilia, the fantasy narrative that Branwell wrote up until his death, that Emily only discontinued, significantly, three years before her death, when Charlotte discovered her poems and persuaded her, much against Emily's will, to cooperative publication of them. Further, the A. G. A. of Emily's poetry is in many ways a temperamental sister to Alexander Percy. Fanny Ratchford, in contrasting Emily's queen of Gondal to Charlotte's Arthur Wellesley, fails to see that Northangerland is her true parallel.⁶ There are many similarities. For example, the name of Emily's protagonist, Augusta, is that of Alexander Percy's first wife; while both probably borrowed it from their knowledge of Byron, Percy's youthful spouse is a woman of breathtaking beauty, completely ruthless behavior, and imperial manner who arranges the murder of her father-in-law: in brief, an image surprisingly close to that of Gondal's queen, which the Byron source does not explain. Both Percy and A. G. A. are known by multiple names, are exiles, are amoral and romantic in similar ways. Thematically, too, Emily and Branwell are similar; both breathe defiance of normal restraints, unwillingness to submit even to the beloved, an assertion of freedom in which ego is full-blown.

While the establishment of Gondal by Emily and Anne in 1834 or thereabouts is always viewed as a rejection of Branwell and Charlotte's Angria, which extended the Glasstown Confederacy on which the four had earlier written, it is worth noting that similarities continue, in both names and characterizations, to the extent that we can extrapolate about Gondal. For instance, both Gondal and Angria are names from India, one a high plateau, the other a pirate kingdom on the Malabar coast. As happens in Branwell's account a decade earlier, there is a contest in Gondal between the “Republicans” and the “Royalists,” as noted in both Emily and Anne's Diary Letters of 1845, with the Emperor losing and then regaining his throne; there is certainly a parallel between certain aspects of the relationship of Julian Brenzaida and Gerald Exina with Alexander Percy and Arthur Wellesley. The names Arthur, Alexander, Edward, Zenobia, Harriet, Julia, and others occur in both Emily's and Branwell's narratives, repetition beyond chance. As mentioned earlier, a considerable number of Branwell's poems were published as Emily's once her reputation as a poet began to grow, and the subject matter frequently represents an echo from one to the other. Their imagery and themes interweave, including a common fascination with the cosmos, particularly the moon and the solitary star, a reverence for the power of imagination and the magic of vision, the indomitability of “the soul” but not in a religious sense so much as that of individual personality, a fatal sense of having done wrong to the beloved, a dismissal of empty creeds and orthodox religiosity, a welcoming of Death out of world weariness and desire for a different realm, a rejection of Heaven itself in favor of the dynamic. What they share distinctly is an obsession with the dark emotions, those that originate in the individual self, frequently those which the world at large necessarily condemns, as a means of social protection. Charlotte and Anne, while sometimes magnificent emotionally, represent public emotions and values, valid ones, to be sure, but they never really speak out of the sinner's heart.

Yet, Branwell is not Emily, and the question that we are finally faced with, in this book, is—how good was he, as a poet? There is no easy answer. After a century and a half, any poet—even a good one—will find it difficult to come out of the shadows and be appreciated by a later generation. The recklessness of thought, the delight in emotional attitudes, the concepts of individual confrontation with life, the direction in which energy flowed—all that made up a bold imagination in 1830 cannot now come to us as fresh and new from an unknown talent from the distant past. Byron, himself, were he to have written all that he had but only been discovered and brought to publication at the present time, would look like a very questionable fish, indeed, and we can concede at the offset that Branwell is not Byron's equal. Yet, there are many of these poems that Brontë readers, to begin with, will find engrossing, and which may well become interesting to all readers who approach them in the proper context.

For one thing, Branwell really was a distinct personality, a writer with a compelling idea of the Extraordinary Man, above normal moral restraints but with a capacity for great sensitivity and suffering as well as great ruthlessness. It is a concept that is distasteful in the morally responsible social atmosphere of the 1980s but one that animated much of the intellectual temper of the nineteenth century; after originating in the Renaissance and peaking in Milton's Lucifer, it found a popular embodiment in the figure of Napoleon, emerged as a consuming interest in Byron, Stendhal, and others, was philosophically justified by Carlyle, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Wagner, and regarded with fascinated horror by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The climax of Romantic individualism, the concept gets its clearest embodiment in the early Victorian novel outside of any social and historical setting in the dual figure of Heathcliff-Cathy I in Wuthering Heights. Branwell's poetry and prose are bound by that concept, and it is almost instinctive for us, today, to react against it, labeling him as childish in his fascination with such a figure. But the Extraordinary Man is a powerful image in our recent intellectual history, and a resurgent one. For good or ill, Branwell Brontë's writings are a sustained investigation of such an emotional life.

Branwell was not a major innovator in verse forms, but with some obvious exceptions, few writers of the time were. Certainly Emily was not. However, Branwell was skillful, sometimes even facile. It does little good to look at his work as early or late; some of the better pieces occur earlier and some of his worst doggerel was produced near the end of his life. A single quatrain within a poem has a lyric force with Emily—consider, for example, the last stanza of “The Linnet in the Rocky Dells”—that subordinates the narrative to the point that we are scarcely aware of it, although it is there and acting on us. Branwell does have a lyric consciousness: even the long chronicle, Letters of an Englishman, written when he was fourteen and which includes some improbable “rare lads” who are seven or eight feet in height, includes pastoral prose passages that represent some of the best writing in it. In the poetry, however, his lyric passages tend to be elements of the narrative (with some exceptions such as the brief “Memory” of July, 1836). His early “Ode to the Polar Star,” completed on his fifteenth birthday and appearing as the first piece in the present collection, shows the strong influence of Byron, with a Manfredian remoteness and separateness of self (imaged in the star) and Cowper:

Then, then how droops the sailor's soul,
Hopeless he gazes toward the pole,
For tossing on an unknown sea
How may he hope to look on thee?

(ll. 40-43)

However, it is more than competent for a school boy, seeking out skillfully the qualities of its subject, as it finishes:

Nor turning ever from thy course aside,
Eternal pilot, while Time passes by,
While earthly guides decay and die,
                    Thou hold'st thy throne,
                    Fixed and alone,
In the vast concave of the nightly sky.
Kingdoms and states may droop and fail,
                    Nor ever still abide;
The mighty moon may wax and wane,
But thou dost silent there remain,—
                    An everlasting guide!

(ll. 74-84)

If the young Branwell was an impressionable writer, his models were good ones, who gave him both his interests and his fluency. Byron, of course, is everywhere to begin with; “Greece! let me drop one tear for thee, / Where hath thy light of freedom gone?” he asks in “Thermopylae” of 1834, but he goes on to display a vital sense of the relationship of people with place:

I said a mountain's stormy height
Hung beetling o'er that Army bright.
Yes! there thou frown'st, Thermopylae,
Thy huge rocks starting to the sky,
Swell forth a barrier broad and high,
And seems as rent by thunder's stroke
Between the ribbed and frowning rock
That path which upward from the shore
Winds high above the torrent's roar.

(ll. 82-93)

If, as modern readers, our eye glides too blankly over such lines, it may be because we do not live with the same fusion of self with landscape.

Needless to say, Shelley is there also, but in ways that may give us a somewhat unexpected link to the later Whitman, reminding us that the nineteenth century was more harmonious in its development than we are accustomed to think. In “My Ancient Ship upon my Ancient Sea,” we find the lines:

Changing, and still the same, yet swiftly passing,
'Tis here, 'tis there, 'tis nowhere, oh! my soul,
Is there no rest from such a fruitless chasing
Of the wild dreams that ever round thee roll!
Each as it comes the parting thought defacing,
Yet all still hurrying to the self-same goal—
Gone ere I catch them, but their path alone
Stretching afar toward one for ever gone!

(ll. 41-48)

Wordsworth, the philosophical Wordsworth, is very much present in this early verse, and it seems a shame that the aging poet never replied to the Yorkshire youth who sent him a sample of his work for comment, particularly when certain parts of it represent the traditional sincerest form of flattery. “Still and bright, in twilight shining,” admittedly, is far from being among Branwell's best efforts. Wordsworth's shades of the prison house certainly are the shadow hanging over such lines as:

But then—the soul was clothed in clay,
So straight its beauty passed away,
And through a whirl of misery driven
Earth's shadow came 'tween it and heaven.

(ll. 78-81)

Yet, Branwell is not slavish in these early obeisances. Where Wordsworth presents a Platonic dichotomy of spiritual and rational consciousness, Branwell sees the darkening of the human soul as the tragedy engendered by the world's affairs. The harshness of life—“the clouds of war, the storms of strife”—make the soul lose its luster, in contrast to the more Olympian detachment of Wordsworth's view. Yet, for Branwell, the soul can intermittently soar as it catches glimpses of light; it is as thought that the soul shines.

The poem goes on for hundreds of lines with echoes of Blake and Vaughan, a borrowing of a few lines from a hymn by Isaac Watts, to a close that, in fact, may explain Wordsworth's rejection, if he in fact ever read the unsolicited piece after receiving it. The final sixty-seven lines are a reversal of the Wordsworthian conception. In a variation on the traditional religious idea, but one characteristic for him, Branwell sees the dropping of the new soul from its heavenly innocence to a mortal corrupted one as imaged in the downfall of Lucifer—the achievement of a sense of solitary self, of ego, of the soul discovering its destiny in ambition:

This light shall change to lightning then,
This love of heaven to Hell of men.
So if thou seekest a glorious name
Thy path shall lead through blood and flame,
From crime to crime, imparting healing,
Blessed thyself and others blessing.

(ll. 298-303)

And Branwell concludes the poem with an invoking of his demogorgon: “Percy! Awake thee from thy sleep. / Awake! to bid thy country weep” (ll. 333-334). There is a decisive rejection in the poem of Heaven and its innocence in favor of Hell, which is directly correlated with earthly life and which by its pain, its agonizing of mind, its sin even, establishes the reality and vitality of existence.

Despite his death-bed murmured prayer as attributed to him by Charlotte, Branwell was throughout his life of the devil's party, and not simply so but as someone who continually explored the tragic implications of necessary knowledge; he took that Tree in the Garden seriously. In the poem “Harriet II” (ll. 53-104), he gives us a paradoxical figure, one rarely encountered: the believing sinner who is not repentant and so suffers agony for which there will be no cure, not even in death.

In the poetry, Branwell also manages at times to fuse the romantic adventures of his narrative and his own consciousness of himself as artist as in his increasingly compulsive identity as Alexander Percy, who over several years of exile sails as a ruthless pirate captain in his ship “The Rover”:

Men dashed on men in trampled blood strew thick each groaning plank,
And all unseen the sabres clash amid each gory rank.
And Percy's arm and Percy's sword bathe all that deck with gore.
Our swords are grown into our hands, our eyes glance fiery light
As faint we stagger o'er the wrecks of that impetuous fight.

(ll. 41-50)

In a companion piece, in which the later Percy listens to the guns in the decisive battle of his rebellion against Zamorna, he thinks back to that time. He has been speaking to himself of the elusive nature of man's dreams and the emergent soul, which he sees tied to them:

What have I written—nothing, for 'tis over,
And seems as nothing in the single cloud
That shadows it, and long has seemed to hover
O'er all the crossing thoughts that overflowed
In this wrecked spirit. Oh, my ocean Rover!
Well may'st thou plough the deep so free and proud.
Thou bear'st the uniting tie of ceaseless dreams,
The fount, the confluence of a thousand streams.

(ll. 49-56)

The dramatic image, however adventurous and fantastic, is tied to a view of self, but it does not stop there. The view of self as a role figure moves in on itself, creates the mind of that role figure, its hope, its guilt, its despair. With astonishing consistency, Branwell created himself in the chronicles as a single complex figure who stands within or behind everything he himself wrote from early adolescence onward. The boy Alexander Percy of “The Life of Alexander Percy” has a child's sensitivity of emotions that Branwell clearly shares, just as the cynical, rootless alcoholic Alexander Percy of And the Weary Are at Rest has arrived at as much of a dead end as Branwell had in that last year or two, after his hopes of Lydia Robinson proved to be irretrievably lost to him.⁷ After 1834, or thereabouts, for the next fourteen years no fictional character in the Angrian drama other than Alexander Percy really interested Branwell. Perhaps the most unusual element of this self-definition is that virtually from the beginning he realizes for the character his own curse, his own damnation, as it is inevitable in his pride, his ambition, his rejection of all subordination, and his inability to give himself unreservedly even to that which he most loves and cherishes. To a varying extent, some of this is present in all of Branwell's major poems, even where Percy does not appear by name.

While Fanny Ratchford in her blanket rejection of Branwell's subject matter dismisses it as a childish replaying of toy soldiers and political argument, she seems actually to be chary of the psychological terrain into which he carries his narratives. One of his longest and most thoroughly worked-out poems, Sir Henry Tunstall, known in other versions as The Wanderer, is about a middle-aged army officer who returns after eighteen years in India, where he has fought alongside Wellington, to the family in England that he has not seen since his youth—his aging parents, his sister, the grave of the now-dead Caroline, once the dearest of all to him. There is not, as might be expected, a crumbling of artificial barriers in a sentimental reunion. The home folk greet him with cautious apprehension and love, while he finds it all empty, devoid of meaning, related to a young man who no longer exists. The poem centers on him lying alone in his old room, seeing on the wall the picture that had inspired him to go in search of fame and honor but finding no positive emotional tie now to the empty artifacts of his boyhood life. Although there is an unfortunate ten lines of conventional sentimental regret tacked on, the poem properly ends at about line 501, to which point the subject of the poem is an analysis of disillusionment:

                                                            For 'twas a bitter task
The hollowness of spirit to unmask
And show the wreck of years.

(ll. 318-320)

Many critics have read it as autobiographical, as indicating Branwell's alienation from his sisters, but that seems to be a clear case of attribution after the fact, since Branwell wrote it in a basically complete form in 1838, when he was only twenty-one and still had several years of harmonious relationship ahead, even with Charlotte. Winnifrith and Du Maurier, taking it simply as a contrast between the sentiments of the family that stays at home and the Wanderer, find it relatively ineffective. However, seen as a study in what might be called the cultural affliction that Branwell himself suffered from, the tragedy of the young Victorian as a Romantic who viewed public life as a boundless opportunity, an open future, it offers a perception unusual from the pen of a twenty-one-year-old youth who had traveled little as yet from the home hearth:

I asked for gain and glory—place and power;
Thou gavest them all—I have them all this hour;
But I forgot to ask for youthful blood,
The thrill divine of feelings unsubdued,
The nerves that quivered to the sound of fame,
The tongue that trembled o'er a lover's name,
The eye that glistened with delightful tears,
The Hope that gladdened past and gilded future years;
So—I have rigid nerves and ready tongue,
Fit to subdue the weak and serve the strong;
And eyes that look on all things as the same,
And Hope—no, callousness, that thinks all things a name!

(ll. 449-460)

Such a point as the crux of this poem tells us something else, however, which is that the proper approach to Branwell's poetry may be a psychological one, that his work is really an exposition of the mind trapped by a fatal interlocking of Romantic belief that is neutralized, but not disposed of, by a profound incapacity to accept the necessary illusions upon which the belief rests. In short, while Branwell/Northangerland is Lucifer incarnate in many works, he is a Lucifer who knows that in wreaking violence upon the world, he most violates himself. It is an apt subject for Branwell, given his end, but it is also a highly dramatic situation from the artistic point of view, one that we are, perhaps, better prepared to accept without a final sentiment in the present day than were readers in 1838.

One of the most important artifacts in the Brontë Parsonage Museum is the annotated volume of Paradise Lost that Branwell and his sisters pored over. They were not the first minds of genius fired by Milton—inspired or corrupted, either reference might be seen as appropriate to Branwell. “How thin the line / Between demonic and divine” said a nameless later poet, and in Branwell we see the line dissolved. That he himself saw this meeting point with hypnotic fascination is established in most of what may be regarded, for various reasons, as his major poems: “Lucifer,” “Azrael, or Destruction's Eve,” “Northangerland's Name,” “An Hour's Musings on the Atlantic,” “Misery, Part I,” “Misery, Part II,” “Percy's Musings upon the Battle of Edwardston,” “Alone Upon Zamorna's Plain,” the “Caroline” and the “Harriet” poems, and “The End of All,” in which ruthlessness is seen as perversely born out of the loss of the beloved who has died:

'Twas not that I forgot my love—
                    That night departing evermore—
'Twas hopeless grief for her that drove
                    My soul from all it prized before;
                    That misery called me to explore
A new-born life, whose stony joy
                    Might calm the pangs of sorrow o'er,
Might shrine their memory, not destroy.

(ll. 57-64)

The death of Percy's gentle and beloved second wife, Mary, is the pain of life itself known as emotional reality—grief and loss is what life gives us when we drop our defenses, and love unreservedly. As Percy goes on to say, in reaction to his wife's death:

                    I rode o'er ranks of bleeding men,
                    I felt that such strange strife and pain
Might me from living death restore.
Ambition I would make my bride,
                    And joy to see her robed in red,
For none through blood so wildly ride
                    As those whose hearts before have bled.

(ll. 76-84)

Speaking some years later, the Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights says much the same thing, of course. This theme, traced through Branwell's poems, provides one line of narrative continuity of some importance. “Percy Hall,” showing the decline of Mary, thus precedes “The End of All,” although it is dated after it and appears in the present edition after it, while “An Hour's Musing on the Atlantic” summarizes the experience, telling us that “the despair of heart” leads to “decay of spirit,” that “like all human joys; / One single touch their bloom destroys.” As is obvious from its title, the poem “The Callousness Produced by Care” goes on to generalize this point: the more you experience, the less, not more, sensitive you are to the sufferings of others: “A tortured heart will make a Tyrant mind.” It is, then, the monstrous suffering of “Lucifer” that makes him the arch-enemy, the Destroyer. If the great Serpent, the Prince of Hell, writhes in agony, it is from within his breast—not that of his virtuous opponent—that Branwell writes. It is he that is the Star of the West, who “shinest to dazzle—not to illume,” who glows greater as the world darkens, as “storm and night / Gave birth and beauty to the blaze” of that Western Star, who is at the end of “Lucifer” identified as Percy.

Azrael, Lucifer, Arch-Destroyer—whatever his name, his role is the same; he is the spirit of the lust for unrestrained freedom, of total selfness which in the end always proves to be curse. As Branwell says in “Lines—Now heavily in clouds” written in 1836 when he was nineteen:

Come life, come death, or conquest or defeat,
I who am called my Judgement here must meet,
With my own arm must carve my road to power,
With my own deeds must fill my fated hour,
With my own lips proclaim what is to be,
And then in my own self meet my own destiny.

(ll. 4-9)

Held at arm's length, as it rarely was by Branwell, this concept could result in his tribute to Lord Nelson, as man of indomitable spirit and leader by inspiration, in “The Triumph of Mind Over Body.” But such objectivity was rare; more often Lucifer Agonistes himself sees his brutal triumph turn to ashes:

“And she is gone whom in thy worst distress
Thou found'st, a fountain in the wilderness!
And He is gone who glorious used to shine
With radiance steadier, brighter far than thine,
All these are gone whom thou hast left to gain,
A flying hope, a meteor light and vain!
Thy flower deprived of warmth will withering die,
Thy store is squandered and thy well run dry,
While He whose glory chased the clouds of woe,
Thy Dearest friend, thou'st made thy Deadliest foe!”

(ll. 31-44)

But there is no bending of his will because of the realization; Branwell had read his Milton well, even if only partially.

When individualism twists invariably into alienation, when freedom always becomes a path to despair, a writer of either eighteen or eighty sees the spectre of death before him. It is no wonder, then, that the one subject on which Branwell and Emily most often meet in their poetry is the attractiveness of death. For Branwell, there is an almost Poe-like association of death with womankind; but rather than unearthly beauty, the distinguishing mark of the woman lost is the profound love that the surviving man feels for her. Whatever else survives of the world he regards with contempt, sometimes hatred, of a Heathcliffian sort. However, Percy, the man without faith who nonetheless believes that for others—such saints as the lost Mary—faith has been redemptive, even death is in many ways a futile end, for if there is no heaven he will never meet her, and if there were one, he would certainly be disbarred from it. For him, the beloved cannot live in a metaphor, the solipsism closes in ever again:

          When thou before me silent lay,
A loveless lifeless form of clay,
When I saw thy coffined form
Decked out to feast the gnawing worm,
When the dull sod o'er thee thrown
                    Hid thee from my tearless eye,
'Twas then my Mary, then alone,
                    I felt what 'twas to Die!

(ll. 272-279)

In poems such as “Peaceful Death and Painful Life” and “Real Rest,” however, we do have an evocation of death, but as annihilation, the end of thought, care, self. In the latter poem, for instance, the poet envies “a corpse upon the waters,” in the closing lines:

But, in exchange for thy untroubled calm,
Thy gift of cold oblivion's healing balm,
I'd give my youth, my health, my life to come,
And share thy slumbers in thy ocean tomb.

(ll. 43-46)

Dated 1845, the poem is echoed in one written the same year by Emily, “Enough of Thought, Philosopher.” More abstract in its view of the self, it nonetheless prays for a similar extinguishing of personality:

“O for a time when I shall sleep
Without identity,
And never care how rain may steep
Or snow may cover me!
No promised Heaven, these wild Desires
Could all or half fulfill;
No threatened hell, with quenchless fires,
Subdue this quenchless will!
O let me die, that power and will
Their cruel strife may close,
And vanquished Good, victorious Ill
Be lost in one repose.”(8)

The last cry is that of Branwell's Alexander Percy, as much as that of Emily or Branwell himself. Seeing the two, brother and sister, as figures created from their own art, it is not an inappropriate epitaph for either of them.

That Branwell's last days were agony, not posturing, was always there to be seen in his unread manuscripts, those minute but endless lines which are as labyrinthine as human character. With this first readily accessible collection of his poetry, the corridors of Branwell Brontë's inner life are, to some degree, finally lighted up; as some of the long prose chronicles of Angria appear, he will further return in some measure to the life that Emily, after death, regained. Then, as with her, the rest that he called for so passionately will be a benediction upon him, rather than the nothingness that he evoked as the bitter fruit of despair. Then the painful emotional destiny of Alexander Percy, the character whom he brought to life only to be himself destroyed by him, will be made meaningful by understanding:

And if indeed—I really die,
Lost—in the abyss of vacancy,
Why then the sum of all will be
That I on earth have lived to see
Not one whole day of happiness
And year on year of mad distress!

(ll. 142-148)

But after reading all through Branwell's poems, one should not, perhaps, depart from him there in that painful place. Rather, the final stanzas of his poem “Now—But One Moment, Let Me Stay,” a lyric which long ago found print when it was misattributed to Emily and published under her name, leaves us with a delicate sense of life that confirms Branwell's identity as a genuine, even if minor poet:

Here am I standing lonely 'neath
                    The shade of quiet trees,
That scarce can catch a single breath
                    Of this sweet evening breeze.
And nothing in the twilight sky
Except its veil of clouds on high,
                    All sleeping calm and grey;
And nothing on the summer gale
But the sweet trumpet's solemn wail
                    Slow sounding far away.
That and the strange, uncertain sound
                    Scarce heard, yet heard by all;
A trembling through the summer ground
                    A murmuring round the wall.

(ll. 11-24)

Let us call it the peace that passeth understanding.

Notes

1. Winifred Gérin, Branwell Brontë (London, 1961), p. 290.

2. Daphne Du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, Penguin Edition (London, 1972), p. 15.

3. See “Letters to the Editor”—Travel (Section 10), The New York Times (Sunday, June 10, 1984), 30: “May we suggest that a walk on the nearby moors might prove more enjoyable and helpful to an understanding of the Brontë genius? Bemoaning the wastrel brother's downfall and making a shrine of the chair in which he sprawled drunkenly would be to waste precious time, as he did.”

4. See, in particular, her best-known work, The Brontës' Web of Childhood (Columbia Univ. Press, 1941), to date the definitive book on the so-called “Juvenilia.” The omnibus Legends of Angria (Yale Univ. Press, 1933 and 1973), which she co-edited with William De Vane, includes only pieces by Charlotte, nothing at all by Branwell.

5. Two Angrian Chronicles of Patrick Branwell Brontë: “The Life of Field Marshal the Right Honourable Alexander Percy, Earl of Northangerland, Lord Viscount Elrington, etc.” and “Real Life in Verdopolis,” edited with an Introduction by R. G. Collins and John Barnard, is scheduled for publication by Leeds University in 1985.

6. See Fanny Ratchford, Gondal's Queen (Univ. of Texas Press, 1955), pp. 22-23.

7. Following what appears to have been the quietest and most harmonious period of his life, in 1845 Branwell was abruptly fired from his position as tutor in the Robinson family at Thorp Green, apparently because of his relationship with Mrs. Robinson, which he later indicated had been intimate for almost three years. See Gérin, pp. 216ff. for the order of events.

8. Emily Brontë: Poems, ed. Rosemary Hartill (London, 1973). Both poems can be assigned to the vast number engendered by Cowper's “The Castaway,” though with obvious philosophical differences. (As Francis Leyland long ago noted, Charlotte Brontë uses a similar figure of a corpse in the waters in her cautionary narrative poem “Gilbert.” All of the Brontës were Cowperites.)