Page 9 - GALIET ETERNITY´S LOVE´S Epitaph: Bronte IV

On pages 64 and 130 of tempestuous Wuthering Heights,1 Emily Brontë, summarizing Catherine Earnshaw’s soul affinity with Heathcliff’s, tells the story of their most wild and embracing love as she creates their immortal epitaph: “I am Heathcliff” and “I cannot live without my soul!” It is humbling to feel the deepest empathy with Brontë’s leading characters whose upheavals and sorrows and joys resemble not only our own passions and habits, but also Brontë’s own:
“What have those lonely mountains worth revealing? More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can center both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.”
(343 – Stanzas, lines 17-20)
These are Emily Brontë’s “Stanzas” that tango to the lit rhythms of Blake’s quintessential, yet blinding mysticism: the fervent energies produced by the fires of hell impregnating the infinite heavens with their creative passions.
Should we desire to experience Brontë’s novel in its terrible splendor and sweeping scope, we must expand our minds beyond the chains of a fixed, closed morality to transcend our own prejudices, as if we were birds of a blooming fire, as if we were personifications of Heathcliff and Catherine: one.
1 Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. A Norton Critical Edition. London, UK: W.W. Norton & Company. 2003.
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