Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Cold in the Earth - Emily Bronte
- Form and structure
- Tightly structured ABAB rhyming scheme
- Causes poem to feel like a
lament, a mourning song
- Little enjambment, most lines
end with some punctuation
that creates a pause (a caesura)
- Suggests ordered, controlled
exploration of narrator's state of mind
- Supports idea she is justifying
her emotions to her dead lover
- Only few occasions does emotion spill over
from one line to the next
- Exclamative in third stanza ('Faithful indeed is
the spirit that remembers/ After such years of
change and suffering!'
- Penultimate line where she talks about
suicidal thoughts in exclamative - 'Sternly
denied its burning wish to hasten/Down to
the tomb already more than mine!'
- Structured around the
progress of her emotions
- Fifth stanza represents
climax of poem
- Anaphora - 'No other.. No other... All
my life's bliss... All my life's bliss'
- Intensity of mood
- She proves her fidelity: she is the
'faithful...spirit' of stanza 3 but now has to let
herself live this new life and cherish 'existence'
- Ends with rhetorical question
- 'dare not let it languish/Dare not indulge'
-repetition conveys her determination
- Question doesn't reflect doubt: though the
world is 'empty' it's where she has to live
- Themes
- Death
- Grief
- Time
- Relationships
- Voice and tone
- Voice is strong but full of
emotion
- Questions herself in opening two
stanzas acknowledging that time has
brought healing, but feeling guilty.
- Conflicted- guilty for not grieving but
acknowledges that she could still become
overwhelmed with grief if she allows herself.
- Self-justificatory (stanza 4); passionate
(stanza 5); rational (stanza 6); self-aware
(stanza 7) and resolved (stanza 8)
- Language
- Repeated references to 'Cold' build
heavy/chilly/sombre atmosphere - 'deep snow piled',
'cold in the dreary grave', 'fifteen wild Decembers' etc.
- Cold is sterile and numbing.
- 'wild' has connotations of savage,
untamed and unrestrained
- Snow piled on grave reflects how time has
distanced narrator from her lover's death
- Imagery sharply contrasted to 'days of golden
dreams', the Sun which 'lightened up my heaven'
and the Star that 'shone for me' -imagery of
intense light and positivity associated with lover.
- Sun symbolic of warmth and life
- Stars symbolise guiding force
- These life forces have been extinguished
- Time
- Capitalised to indicate importance
- Described in two metaphors: 'all-wearing wave' and
'World's tide' Metaphors introduce idea of natural flow,
that emotions change over time. World's tide 'bearing
[her] along' suggests things are happening beyond her
control, she passively rides them out supported by time.
- Youth
- Two references in poem: 'Sweet love of
youth' and later her own 'young soul'.
Suggests a process of maturation.
- Uses oxymorons to describe new life:
'sterner desires' and 'darker hopes'. It's
more serious, she's grown up.
- Narrator refers to Memory's 'rapturous pain'
and the 'divinest anguish'. Captures
bittersweet moment of recalling a loved one.