Emilie Glen as Emily Brontë

My friend Emilie Glen, poet, actress, and pianist, had a lifelong
fascination with the Brontës. When a Brontë scholar named Norma Crandall
decided to tour a lecture on the Brontës, she asked Emilie Glen to
portray Emily Brontë, reading her poetry. This poem came from her
experience "channeling" Emily of the moors.

NAMED EMILY

by Emilie Glen

Named Emily,  playing Emily
            Emily Brontë,
I swim the timeless sea
            to her heathered shore,
Climb the hill to the parsonage
not telling her I am from
     the Twentieth century
     where I breathe her to life stage nights,
Know better than to startle her
     with the terrible Twentieth.
     (Still the Twentieth could cure her TB.)
This too might alarm her
in her gathering of death like heather

            Emily offers me tea
at the table where the Brontës
     write of an evening,
The two of us sit in Emily shyness,
our words in leaf bracts on separate trees,
     I am keeping her from the moors,
    from the fires of her white page,

I would suggest we go out to the "lone green lane
     that leads directly to the moors"
only I can't let on how well I know her life,
her death on the very horse-hair sofa
          across from us

Ellen Nussey says she plays the piano
     with brilliance and precision,
     I chord into Debussy,
     swiftly finger back to Bach
expecting her to sit down at the piano too,
but she has nothing to play to me     say to me,
I might as well be in the graveyard
          outside her window
Aunt Branwell and her Father will be coming in
     any timeless minute,
Such a dark little parlor and she doesn't
          even bother
     to light the lamp,
I'll drink her tea
     and warm-swim back to my shore


Note: Ellen Nussey (1817-1897) was a childhood friend of Charlotte
Brontë, and a lifelong correspondent.


This is selected from The Poet's Press volume, The Writings of Emilie
Glen, Volume 1: Poems from Chapbooks.

http://a.co/d/fDUKhJ6

SUBJECTS: Emilie Glen, Emily Bronte, Brontes, Ellen Nussey.