No Coward Soul Is Mine

 

Emily Bronte

Emily Bronte

Here is a resolute poem of faith in the face of death by Emily Bronte, who I wrote on this past week.  When she died three years after composing it, she did so with a fortitude that showed that she wasn’t just spinning words.  Perhaps it can fortify others going through tragedy and loss.

Bronte’s vision of God is of a being who is not to be reached through creeds (“worthless as withered weeds/Or idlest froth amid the boundless main”) but is to be accessed through the heart.  In this way she is like that other famous Emily, Emily Dickinson. The poet feels anchored in God’s “wide embracing love” which (note her strong and confident verbs) “animates eternal years/Pervades and broods above,/Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears.”  Parts of the poem remind me of Adonais, Percy Shelley’s elegy on John Keats which soothed me in my own encounter with death.

No Coward Soul Is Mine

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life–that in me has rest,
As I–undying Life–have power in thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.

With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou–THOU art Being and Breath,
And what THOU art may never be destroyed.

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