Emily Dickinson

Charlotte Brontë's Grave

CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S GRAVE.
ALL overgrown by cunning moss,
All interspersed with weed,

Currer Bell

Charlotte Brontë's male pseudonym. She published *Jane Eyre* under this name in 1847 to be taken seriously as a writer.

The little cage of 'Currer Bell,'
In quiet Haworth laid.

Haworth

The Yorkshire village where the Brontë family lived. Charlotte is buried in the church where her father was rector.

This bird, observing others,
When frosts too sharp became,
Retire to other latitudes,
Quietly did the same,
But differed in returning;
Since Yorkshire hills are green,

Nightingale metaphor

The nightingale doesn't live in Yorkshire—Dickinson knows this. She's calling Charlotte an exotic bird that never belonged in those harsh hills.

Yet not in all the nests I meet
Can nightingale be seen.

Nightingale metaphor

The nightingale doesn't live in Yorkshire—Dickinson knows this. She's calling Charlotte an exotic bird that never belonged in those harsh hills.

Gathered from many wanderings,

Gethsemane

The garden where Christ suffered before crucifixion. Dickinson frames Charlotte's suffering as Christ-like agony before reaching paradise.

Gethsemane can tell
Through what transporting anguish
She reached the asphodel!

Asphodel

The flower of the Greek afterlife, growing in the Elysian Fields. Dickinson mixes Christian heaven with classical paradise.

Soft fall the sounds of Eden
Upon her puzzled ear;
Oh, what an afternoon for heaven,
When 'Brontë' entered there!
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Bird That Couldn't Migrate

Dickinson builds the entire poem on one extended metaphor: Charlotte Brontë as a nightingale trapped in Yorkshire. The metaphor works on multiple levels. Literally, nightingales don't live in northern England—they're southern birds. Symbolically, the nightingale represents the poet-singer, going back to Keats. Charlotte was an artist stuck in a provincial parsonage, watching others "retire to other latitudes" while she stayed put.

The migration metaphor gets darker in the second stanza. Charlotte "differed in returning"—she died young, at 38, nine months pregnant. The euphemism is typical Dickinson: death as a bird that flew south and never came back. The line "Since Yorkshire hills are green" twists the knife. Spring came, the season when birds return, but Charlotte's grave just grew moss.

Dickinson never met Brontë (who died in 1855), but she read her obsessively. The "little cage" of line 3 refers both to the grave and to Charlotte's constrained life—the parsonage, the failed school, the isolation. That she puts 'Currer Bell' in quotes matters: even in death, Dickinson honors the pseudonym, the male disguise Charlotte needed to be heard.

Dickinson's Heaven Problem

The final stanza does something strange: it makes heaven seem confused by Charlotte's arrival. "Soft fall the sounds of Eden / Upon her puzzled ear"—why is Charlotte puzzled? Why does heaven need an "afternoon" to adjust? Dickinson suggests that someone who suffered as much as Charlotte doesn't fit easily into paradise.

Gethsemane and asphodel shouldn't appear in the same poem. Gethsemane is Christ's suffering in the garden; asphodel is the Greek afterlife flower. Dickinson deliberately mixes Christian and pagan imagery, as if no single tradition can contain what Charlotte endured or deserved. The "transporting anguish" is both her earthly suffering and the ecstasy that supposedly follows—but Dickinson sounds skeptical.

That last line—"When 'Brontë' entered there!"—reads like Emily imagining heaven's shock. The exclamation point is rare for Dickinson. It's as if she's saying: heaven better make room, because Charlotte Brontë earned this more than your average Christian. The whole poem is Dickinson's argument that artistic suffering counts as religious suffering, that the nightingale's song was Charlotte's Gethsemane.