Cold in the earth (or Remembrance) by Emily Bronte
1- Biographical sketch
- Emily Bronte was born in 1818
- Father was rector of local church
- Lived in small village / environment : barren landscape, marked by bleakness of
moorland
- 2 sisters died of tuberculosis
- Reclusive life / was home schooled
- Wrote Wuthering Heights (1847 novel about a doomed romance)
- Became a teacher but the long days of work affected her health
- Moved back with her father
- With her two sisters Ann and Charlotte they used men’s pen names to publish their
novels
- Died when she was 30
2- Summary
‘Cold in the earth’ is an elegiac poem about the loss of a past lover. The speaker moves from
despairing about the loss to wondering about whether she has to move on with her life. In
the poem’s first half she admits being ‘beset by other hopes and other desires’ during the
fifteen years since her lover’s death and asks for forgiveness for forgetting. She denies failing
to remember in the poem’s second half saying that forgetting is more an appearance as it is
always incomplete.
3- Analysis (linear approach)
The poem opens with two lines that are a statement of the speaker’s dramatic situation .
The speaker is addressing directly someone who is dead, ‘cold in the earth’. The exclamation
mark indicates the speaker is almost shouting at the dead lover, deeply buried in his grave
under the snow. The repetition of the word ‘far’ indicates the sense of distance and
separation reinforced by the word ‘ severed’ in the last line of the 1st stanza.
The rhetorical question about whether or not the speaker has forgotten her lover implies
clearly that the answer is no, she hasn’t. Although time threatens to provoke forgetting in
this case the ‘severing’ hasn’t been achieved. Time, or the passing of time is evoked through
the imagery of an ocean and its waves, almost as an analogy for the divide between the living
and the dead.
In the second stanza the speaker emphasises the distance between her and her lover with
the references to ‘ northern shore’ and ‘ over the mountains’. The passing of time is
underscored again in the words ‘now’ and ‘no longer’. The whole stanza is also a rhetorical
question that reveals again the emotional conflict between the desire to remember and the
possibility of forgetting.
Stanza three has a sense of duality as the speaker evokes both Winter and Spring. The snow
of the poem’s first line has melted into Spring. The juxtaposition of cold through ‘snow’ and
‘December’ and warmth through ‘Spring’ evokes both the duality of emotions and the
realization by the speaker of the difference between her being alive and her lover being
dead ; a necessary understanding to achieve grief. The contrast between seasonal change
and human ability to remember is also underscored through these images and through the
focus on the ‘spirit that remembers’ that resists even after ‘such years of change and
suffering’. The focus is reinforced with the use of the exclamation mark that ends the stanza.
The honesty of the speaker is underscored in the fourth stanza, as she recognizes that love
can fade away since she recognises that the world offers ‘other hopes and other desires’.
The metaphor of the ‘world’s tide’ suggests that life and death are unavoidable just like the
highs and lows of the sea. However, although the speaker expresses her capacity to take
what the world has to offer, the use of the exclamation mark again indicates strongly that
‘obscuring’ memory doesn’t mean it disappears.
The fifth stanza makes use of anaphora to reinforce the idea that nothing will ever be the
same as the love she had with her ‘sweet love of youth’ referred to in the previous stanza. It
is indicated by the repetition of the negative at the beginning of the first two lines. The
anaphoric ‘all my life’s bliss’ is meant to show the reader that though life has offered new
possibilities it has not led the speaker to have another man in hers.
The 6th stanza underscores the powerlessness of even the darkest ‘Despair’ to destroy the
possibilities of ‘existence’. The theme of the passing of time is present again with the
expressions ‘when the days’ and the idea of change with the conjunction ‘then’ as the mark
of a turning point in time for some understanding ; ‘did I learn’.
The 7th stanza evokes a strong realization with the repetition of the construction ‘Then did I’
that reiterates the awareness of the continuity of life. There is an emotional vitality in this
penultimate stanza elicited with the diction ; ‘passion’ ‘ yearning’ ‘burning wish’ that
contrasts with the idea of death ; ‘ tomb’.
In the last stanza there is a strong psychological refusal to ‘drink deep of that divinest
anguish’ and to give in to ‘memory’s rapturous pain’. The poem ends with a question that
holds the speaker’s determination and a word, ‘again’, that emphasizes continuation and
not termination. The sense of ‘again’ and the rising inflexion of the question mark create
tension with the reader’s awareness of having come to the end of the poem. This
underscores the speaker’ own tension between the fact that she is now stronger than before
to move on with her life and the continuing presence of memory. This seems to indicate the
poet’s desire to avoid closure .
The poem, therefore, shows the speaker dealing with a dilemna : forgetting her lost love and
responding favorably to life’s potentialities as she represses her wish to die and shows great
emotional vitality. The imagery does reflect her psychological transformation from uncontrollable
grief to a calmer and more poised one, however refraining from giving a rigid conclusion.