“Because the Dazzling Sun Restored My Earth to Joy” by Emily Brontë | Contemplative Poem About Stars

This video features a poetry recital by a female reader with an American accent. The woman’s voice is breathy, meditative and mellifluous. The poem read aloud is “Because the Dazzling Sun Restored My Earth to Joy” by the 19th-century English poet Emily Brontë (1818–1848). ― The stars in this poem are not objects of contemplation, but not merely so: they are companions, almost living intelligences, whose ‘glorious eyes’ gaze into the speaker’s own. There is something wonderfully audacious about this sense of reciprocity. The heavens, ordinarily the supreme image of human insignificance, seem to take a personal interest in her existence. However, the experience described by the poem is not simply one of tranquillity. The comparison of the dreaming mind to a ‘petrel on the sea’ suggests exhilaration and a certain wildness; the imagination is at liberty in an immeasurable element, just as the bird is at home upon the restless ocean. The poem was composed on 14 April 1845, and appeared the following year in “Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell”. It belonged to Brontë’s personal notebook rather than the one devoted explicitly to Gondal, the elaborate imaginary world she had created with her sister Anne. The ‘watch divine’ of the stars suggests a providential presence, but one discovered through immediate feeling rather than doctrine. Indeed, there is something almost unorthodox about the speaker’s spirituality: the world of familiar human activity seems spiritually impoverished beside the mysterious communion available in solitude. Yet the poem is far too attentive to the physical world to be understood simply as a rejection of it. Brontë makes the sunrise remarkably beautiful, even as her speaker resents its arrival. The sun bathes ‘in gold the misty dale’ and flashes ‘upon the hill’: these are vigorous, delighted observations, scarcely the language of someone incapable of appreciating daylight. Even more interesting is the speaker’s inability to shut the sun out. Her eyelids close, but she continues to see it blazing through them. What she can freely participate in at night she cannot recover by an effort of will, while the daylight she wishes to exclude imposes itself upon her senses. The poem culminates in the remarkable violence of the final stanza. Earlier the speaker had gratefully ‘drank’ the beams of the stars; now the sun becomes the drinker, feeding upon human suffering. This echo makes the distinction between the two kinds of experience more disturbing: one sustains the self, while the other seems to consume it. The masculine sun, with his ‘blinding reign’, also acquires something of the character of an earthly ruler, exercising a power that is absolute but not necessarily benevolent. Yet the speaker's private distress has now expanded into an indictment of the human condition, and we need not accept that indictment without reservation. The poem has already shown us the sun bringing joy to nature; its final representation of daylight as a universal torment is emotionally compelling precisely because it is so extravagant. Brontë allows the longing for an inaccessible happiness to reach its fullest, almost defiant expression. The speaker has been most profoundly awake in her dreams, and longs to recover a kind of consciousness that ordinary wakefulness has extinguished. The full text of the poem is given below. ― Ah! why, because the dazzling sun Restored my earth to joy Have you departed, every one, And left a desert sky? All through the night, your glorious eyes Were gazing down in mine, And with a full heart’s thankful sighs I blessed that watch divine! I was at peace, and drank your beams As they were life to me And revelled in my changeful dreams Like petrel on the sea. Thought followed thought—star followed star Through boundless regions on, While one sweet influence, near and far, Thrilled through and proved us one. Why did the morning rise to break So great, so pure a spell, And scorch with fire the tranquil cheek Where your cool radiance fell? Blood-red he rose, and arrow-straight, His fierce beams struck my brow; The soul of Nature sprang elate, But mine sank sad and low! My lids closed down—yet through their veil I saw him blazing still; And bathe in gold the misty dale, And flash upon the hill. I turned me to the pillow then To call back Night, and see Your worlds of solemn light, again Throb with my heart and me! It would not do—the pillow glowed And glowed both roof and floor, And birds sang loudly in the wood, And fresh winds shook the door. The curtains waved, the wakened flies Were murmuring round my room, Imprisoned there, till I should rise And give them leave to roam. O Stars and Dreams and Gentle Night; O Night and Stars return! And hide me from the hostile light That does not warm, but burn— That drains the blood of suffering men; Drinks tears, instead of dew: Let me sleep through his blinding reign, And only wake with you!