Choice

 

  Photo by Rachel Penney on Unsplash

Today is National Poetry Day, and the theme this year is 'Choice'. Amongst the permission-cleared poems suggested for sharing, based on the theme, is the one below by Emily Bronte.

For my 18th birthday, my sister bought me a copy of Emily Bronte's poems, and in the front she wrote out the final stanza. We had not long before been on wild and exhilarating youth hostelling holiday to the Lake District, so Janet's choice of words was particularly apt. 

Now, almost 50 years later, I'm blessed to live near Bronte country 'where the wild wind blows', and I think that, after life's many twists and turns, I finally have the confidence to walk where 'my own nature would be leading'.

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

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 centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

Emily Brontë

Writing prompts:

• Write for a few minutes in response to Emily Bronte's poem. Don't worry if you don't fully understand it. Perhaps just choose a word, or phrase, and see where that takes you.
• Think about the choices you have made in your life. Write about one, either good or bad, and the impact it had on your life.
• What dreams have you had of 'things which cannot be'? Write about them.
• Where is 'your own nature' leading you right now? Dare you follow? Explore this question in your writing.