That wind is from the North, I know it well;
No other breeze could have so wild a swell.
Now deep and loud it thunders round my cell,
Then faintly dies,
And softly sighs,
And moans and murmurs mournfully.
I know its language; thus it speaks to me –
‘I have passed over thy own mountains dear,
Thy northern mountains – and they still are free,
Still lonely, wild, majestic, bleak and drear,
And stern and lovely, as they used to be
When thou, a young enthusiast,
As wild and free as they,
O’er rocks and glens and snowy heights
Didst often love to stray.
I’ve blown the wild untrodden snows
In whirling eddies from their brows,
And I have howled in caverns wild
Where thou, a joyous mountain child,
Didst dearly love to be.
The sweet world is not changed, but thou
Art pining in a dungeon now,
Where thou must ever be;
No voice but mine can reach thine ear,
And Heaven has kindly sent me here,
To mourn and sigh with thee,
And tell thee of the cherished land
Of thy nativity.’
Blow on, wild wind, thy solemn voice,
However sad and drear,
Is nothing to the gloomy silence
I have had to bear.
Hot tears are streaming from my eyes,
But these are better far
Than that dull gnawing tearless void
The stupor of despair.
Confined and hopeless as I am,
O speak of liberty,
O tell me of my mountain home,
And I will welcome thee.
• Note: ‘time’ replaces ‘void’ in some texts.
The Glass Town Federation (the paracosm invented by the four Brontë children), began with a box of toy soldiers given to Branwell in June 1826. The game evolved into a series of written narratives, penned neatly on numerous doll-sized fragments of paper by the elder children, Branwell and Charlotte, with contributions from Emily and Anne. Its role in the literary development of the three sisters must have been considerable.
There were four countries in the imaginary Federation. Branwell and Charlotte focused on the one called Angria but, when Charlotte went away to school, the younger siblings Anne and Emily eagerly devoted themselves to the continuation of the drama in their own country, named Gondal.
The North Wind, one of the “Gondal poems” by Anne Brontë (1820-1849), concerns the imprisoned Alexandrina Zenobia, a character Anne is said to have based on the archaeologist and explorer, Lady Hester Stanhope. Alexandrina in her dungeon is visited by the North Wind who has been sent, it explains “[t]o mourn and sigh with thee/ And tell thee of the cherished land/ Of thy nativity.”
Like other Gondal poems by both the sisters, it inhabits the conventions of the romantic adventure-story genre in a free-spirited, independent manner, also reaching beyond our contemporary stereotype of the Brontë “story”. Perhaps it owes the breath of authenticity to the conflicts in the children’s personal experience, not least the difference between the freedoms of the surrounding moorland and the more tightly controlled – and motherless – family interior of the Haworth parsonage. The North Wind, paradoxically a force of loving warmth, dispatched by Heaven to comfort the prisoner, is perhaps a figure for the lost mother as well as the untamed landscape.
It gives voice to the prisoner’s own memories of her native Northern mountains as if sharing her identity. Sometimes, it pours out a torrent of adjectives. Oddly, the effect is positive, perhaps because the sonorities are varied but melodious, and the enumerated qualities subtly contrasted. The mountains are “[s]till lonely, wild, majestic, bleak and drear,/ And stern and lovely, as they used to be// When thou a young enthusiast,/ As wild and free as they// O’er rocks and glens and snowy heights/ Didst often love to stray.”
Alexandrina begins the poem with a moment of dramatic recognition, so that we immediately hear the first of the two voices and recognise the oral nature of the composition. The orality is underlined by the supple free-range rhythmic movement, and the variety of stanza structure and metre. As a poem, The North Wind is a kind of Ode – one with two singers. Perhaps Anne had read Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind (published in 1820) and decided a less compact and formal style than Shelley’s would best embody the North Wind’s declamations, although she may be sounding her own political note when the prisoner commands the wind, “O speak of liberty”. “Liberty” is a term, after all, that implies something more humanly pertinent than the freedom of the mountains.
In the fifth stanza, the prisoner replies to the North Wind, launching a psychological insight impressive for an 18-year-old writer. Though “sad and drear,” the wind’s voice, says the prisoner, is nothing to the “gloomy silence” she has had to endure: in fact, she prefers the arousal of painful emotions and “hot tears” to the “stupor of despair”. The unexpected off-rhyme of “silence” with “voice” is eloquent. Again, there’s a suggestion that lived experience authenticates the insight and the tone.
Anne Brontë had only a little longer than a decade left for her writing: she died of her tuberculosis at the age of 29. Her poems are included in the first Brontë book to be published, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Her two works of fiction are Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
• This article was amended on 9 May 2023. A previous version mistakenly said “is” instead of “it” in line seven of the poem.
