I provide here a quote from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Main protagonist Jane describes the house, called simply Moor House, and the environs of her adoptive family, the Rivers, on the edge of the wild, presumably Yorkshire moors back during the reign of George III³³ The word moor appears forty-three times in Jane Eyre. After the second or third use, I was just putty in Charlotte’s hands…

They loved their sequestered home. I, too, in the grey, small, antique structure, with its low roof, its latticed casements, its mouldering walls, its avenue of aged firs—all grown aslant under the stress of mountain winds; its garden, dark with yew and holly—and where no flowers but of the hardiest species would bloom—found a charm both potent and permanent. They clung to the purple moors behind and around their dwelling—to the hollow vale into which the pebbly bridle-path leading from their gate descended, and which wound between fern-banks first, and then amongst a few of the wildest little pasture-fields that ever bordered a wilderness of heath, or gave sustenance to a flock of grey moorland sheep, with their little mossy-faced lambs—they clung to this scene, I say, with a perfect enthusiasm of attachment. I could comprehend the feeling, and share both its strength and truth. I saw the fascination of the locality. I felt the consecration of its loneliness: my eye feasted on the outline of swell and sweep—on the wild colouring communicated to ridge and dell by moss, by heath-bell, by flower-sprinkled turf, by brilliant bracken, and mellow granite crag. These details were just to me what they were to them—so many pure and sweet sources of pleasure. The strong blast and the soft breeze; the rough and the halcyon day; the hours of sunrise and sunset; the moonlight and the clouded night, developed for me, in these regions, the same attraction as for them—wound round my faculties the same spell that entranced theirs.

… the consecration of its loneliness indeed. I often read this passage just to muse upon the wistful, moody, delicately melancholic, intentionally anti-spectacular subtleties she describes—and how this and other choice moments set the whole tone and mood of the book. Charlotte Brontë establishes light and dark as equals, then works expertly with the gradient there between. The dim, the shadows, the dark, the harsh, even at times merciless inclemencies are features not bugs. She does not suppress dark, perhaps knowing that if it were seen an equal to light it would eventually prove itself the older, wiser sibling, capable of rich, complimentary contributions.

One notable gradient boon is how she has the Moor House environs so very abandoned, lonely, thus ultra-wild exactly because they are so unpresuming and overlooked, so bereft of anything nature-spectacular … as opposed to some breathtaking primordial wilderness millions of miles away visited only by intrepid explorers.⁴⁴ …or by modern, well-off tourists. Indeed, subtle and unassuming become the older, wiser siblings of grand and spectacular. Notable too how Jane arrived at Moor House—on her hands and knees half dead from hunger and exposure, thus, adding complete vulnerability to this sublime mix. And once recovered, she is still every bit the underdog—relative to us today in our modern nature-dominating high-tech, hyper-materialist world. This point is key to what I’ll say later…

The second half of my childhood was spent in Tennessee, and my favourite place was the Great Smoky Mountains National Park high on the ancient Appalachian Mountains border of Tennessee and North Carolina. The Smokies are a federally protected, quasi-pristine wilderness of 522,419 acres, surrounded by lesser-protected though still completely wilderness USDA National Forest lands adding another million or so acres. Statistics say the national park itself is the most-visited of all U.S. national parks with nearly fourteen million tourists per year,⁵⁵ …more than double the next most popular, the Grand Canyon… with additional tourist attractions and accommodations all around the park boundaries. And what are these visitors doing? Nothing like early-nineteenth-century Jane on her moor. Only a tiny fraction are actually out on the park’s extensive wilderness trails hiking and camping. Most are either driving up and down the main dissecting highway connecting Tennessee to North Carolina or simply crowding into the visitor centres, again, per automobile. I once visited on the Fourth of July, stopping in the main tourist town bordering the park, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where the sidewalks were standing-room-only. But later that same day I hiked for hours deep in the park on the main Appalachian Trail and saw not another human… Strange as this may seem, I say Jane’s Yorkshire moorlands are real nature, while the Smokies are something else, simply because of the sheer abstraction, the artificiality of their purpose, not to mention their being so recognised, their well-known-ness throughout the entire world.

To be sure, the Smokies are fussed and ruled over by legion of scientists and bureaucrats at the behest of the U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service, UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention, the International Biosphere Programme, etc., like a great research terrarium under an invisible glass dome. Even in the remotest, genuinely wild spots many miles from any human disturbance, the weight of humanity’s lurking dominance, our collective mental presence is inescapably massive… And so we have the dichotomy of discovered versus undiscovered, exotic versus vernacular, integrated versus detached, grounded versus abstract, thousands versus no matches to googling. As the Rivers’ guest, Jane describes a natural and organic connection to her moorland. And yet no modern tourist can ever expect to become truly integrated with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park complex as Jane was with her moorlands.⁶⁶ Perhaps give the Smokies a second chance by reading the pre-park fictional work Christy by Catherine Marshall. She captures something that might be called Appalachian Gothic. Lots more on what nature really means to us later…

Let’s hear from another of my principals, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson²⁴²⁴ See here for a quick biography.

In her day, life was a struggle—with entropy, adversity, depression, with Death ready to lap over the gunwales of a person’s little lifeboat at any time. Emily Dickinson of mid-1800s Amherst, Massachusetts, relates human suffering in a severe and fatalistic yet grounded way by pulling me into a dark place where I am suddenly thrown into reliance on alternative, finer, higher sensibilities. Again, all we may ever do in our lives is disperse, reorder the initially searing, inescapable pain to a dull, hopefully diluted ache in the ever-growing backdrop of time. We never “win” the race, but perhaps we do get recognition for participating—first and foremost from ourselves, then from the network of fellow humans around us.²⁵²⁵ Where has our human network gone? Something tells me getting pity responses to a YouTube comment isn’t the same…

As she said in a letter …but to all except anguish the mind soon adjusts. Though again I would say the subject of pain, suffering, and loss was better conducted in the past than today. How, why? Because first and foremost they did not attempt to contain, disguise, systematise, or process greif; rather, greif was faced directly, pain was shared, empathy a way of interconnecting in a healthy communal life. And so emotional space was allotted, support was natural, organic, openly shared. Strikingly different from today was their acceptance of doom²⁶²⁶ Doom as unforeseen consequences of previous actions, which in turn, entropically snowball into indebtedness, tragedy, and ruin; typically multi-generational, a punishment that never seems to fit the original crime—if it was a crime at all. One German word for doom is Untergang, which also means downfall. and fate, two concepts antithetical to our dynamic, positivist, self-determining, fix and paper-over-everything-quickly modern ways … which for most led to faith in God and acceptance of His will.

Especially death was handled differently. Consider Queen Victoria²⁷²⁷ Queen Victoria in mourning black ca. 1862.


who wore mourning black from the time of her husband Prince Albert’s death in 1861 until the end of her life in 1901. Likewise, Amélie of Leuchtenberg who upon losing her husband Pedro I of Brazil in 1834, wore mourning black until her death in 1873. In those days death was properly, officially mourned. No one hustled mourners along with their grief and sadness. Contrast this with today’s all-too-prevalent disassociation, the confused emotional shutdown, the disorganised quasi-denial and suppression we moderns too often show towards death²⁸²⁸ Is there anything worse than the so-called five stages of grief or the Kübler-Ross model? Grief as an emotional malfunction to be systematically reduced, fixed, corrected? Alas. . For the early nineteenth century, poetising life’s train of tragedy was depression deconstruction as a life skill. The slings and arrows of human existence found conjunction with Nature, Dark, and Faith through poetry, thereby highlighting, elevating, ennobling our uniquely human experience on Earth, thereby casting a gossamer of sublimity over our natural existence like no other generation before or since. Theirs was the deepest exploration of our true humanness that I know, and, thus, something I must pursue and showcase here.

Allow me to insert a passage from a letter Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Abiah Root in 1846 when she was only sixteen years of age. She describes a visit to Boston and the first true American cemetery, Mount Auburn.⁵³⁵³ Abiah Root (Strong), Amherst Emily’s childhood friend

Have you ever been to Mount Auburn? If not, you can form but slight conception of this “City of the Dead.” It seems as if nature had formed this spot with a distinct idea in view of its being a resting-place for her children, where, wearied and disappointed, they might stretch themselves beneath the spreading cypress, and close their eyes “calmly as to a night’s repose, or flower’s at set of sun.”

…teenager Amherst Emily feeling the Dark Muse. Here is one of her many poems about Death

…and probably Haworth Emily’s most moving elegiac lines about (one of) her deceased sister(s) in her grave— Song

Indeed, a human being human about Death… To many all this talk of mine are just some strange idealisations. But no, if we do not see Nature as birth, growth, deterioration, and Death, we have no moorings, and, thus, we are adrift in a void of our own collective insanity.

It was only a few decades into the eighteenth century, many decades before Wordsworth or Novalis, when there emerged in Britain a style of poetry which has since been named the Graveyard School. As I do with Novalis and his HttN, I can’t help but believe these English Graveyarders were more sleepwalkers than any sort of intentional movement leaders. My Exhibit A of Graveyard is Edward Young’s epic-length The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality (or simply Night-Thoughts, ca. 1742-1745).⁷⁴⁷⁴ From my 1853 copy


Bursting with a grandiosity best provided by poetry, Young relentlessly spins out darkness and doom. To be sure, he is Dark with a shudder, full of fright memes meant to weigh down and ultimately defeat—that is, if we take him seriously. A quick taste

…indeed, life eternal war with unrelenting woe. Typical of Graveyard School, there is no hope, no escape, just the weight of an assumed curse (ultimately original sin?), then processions of lamentation to cliff edges and the fated tumbling thereoff. Reading further

or

I just hate it when dreams infest the grave, don’t you? Of course every student of the Dark Muse should read Young’s Night-thoughts. But as I say, this over-the-top doom hyperbole will eventually deliver even the most indulgent reader to incredulity. Dare I say at some point it becomes farce.⁷⁵⁷⁵ YMMV. Personally, I like a good doom-and-gloom session, and Young really delivers with Night Thoughts. Later we’ll go into Emily Brontë’s take on doom-and-gloom and her more measured Christian perspective.

Though Graveyard had a more contemplative, measured side. For example, Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) treats our intellect with more respect. To be sure, eulogising the dead is a much older and well established genre, typically emphasising the qualities of the deceased over the dark, eternal abyss his grave might represent. If we are not meant to survive Young’s relentless pounding, Gray’s elegy of a lost friend is Dark and fatalist and yet reverent and faithful

With Gray whatever woefulness, doom may be swirling about, God in his heavenly domain still has our backs. In short, Gray will not beat us down as much as did the hardcore Graveyard Schoolers.

Whence this proto-Dark? Was it simply in the air? As I insist about the Dark Muse in general, Graveyard arrived unexpectedly, a natural, organic upwelling—however heavy and oppressive its expression. Which begs the question, What rises to cultural and intellectual prominence in an age?⁷⁶⁷⁶ …that is, in a past age not exposed to the science of modern public relations. See this about Edward Bernays and the birth of modern advertising and public relations. TL;DR: Since Bernays, no “movement” in our modern times can be considered natural and organic, rather, the result of somebody’s financed public relations campaign. To be sure, many of that era condemned gothic and Graveyard as unworthy subculture. But eventually came a refinement, which I might call the Night School. Though intervening was the gothic novel, which we will now investigate.⁷⁷⁷⁷ …but the Germans were not idle during this time, either. I should also mention Gottfried August Bürger’s very popular and often translated into English epic poem Lenore from 1774.

Prose versus poetry. In the past, poetry was seen by members of polite society as the higher, the acceptable form of literature. For example, Germany has long been referred to as the land of poets and thinkers.⁷⁸⁷⁸ Das Land der Dichter und Denker. Intentionally absent was novelists. Although now novelists count as part of die Belletristik, i.e., schöngeistige Literatur or aesthetic literature. Prose in the form of the novel,⁷⁹⁷⁹ Two terms, novel (English) and roman (French, German, etc. from the adjectival Roman, Roman-like) came to describe any long-form prose story-telling. on the other hand, was not acceptable, seen as too revealing invasive personal, i.e., it is improper, unseemly, distasteful to expose even an imaginary person’s life details in such an open and revealing fashion. Thus, according to this attitude, it was a crude thing to so freely fantasise human goings-on in a fictitious way. Rather, literature must ennoble the human as a being created in the likeness of God, and so let us not dwell on his mundanity and failings. After all, a novel was neither factual (e.g. a saint’s hagiography) nor high lyrical poetic (e.g., church hymn lyrics or Heldenlieder). A novel/roman was simply too plain-spoken, i.e., the unavoidable clarity of straight descriptive writing invariably generated an undesirable ordinariness. And so it was in this mise en scène that the prose novel bumped along post-Medieval Age as a tolerated, sometimes useful corruption of writing, a regrettable parallel to poetry, consumed mainly, as was often said, by easily excited arriviste vulgarian middle-class women. But then as the middle class grew in power and numbers, the novel came to the fore, especially in the eighteenth century.⁸⁰⁸⁰ Ironically, the Novella, a long short-story format with no chapter breaks, was better tolerated in Germany.

Modern academe considers the novel The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story, appearing in its first edition in 1764, to be the official start of British gothic literature.⁸¹⁸¹ One giveaway is gothic in the title. Perhaps read this overview of Gothic fiction. Written by the excentric, iconoclastic English nobleman Horace Walpole (1717 – 1797), Otranto is a melodrama set in sixteenth-century Naples offering slumming, darkly inclined readers of the day a big dose of darkness, doom, and woe. Walpole’s penchant for medievalism rode the long-simmering nostalgic idealisation of the Medieval Age⁸²⁸² Walpole initially claimed Otranto to be a medieval manuscript he had discovered and translated, when all along it had been his own creation. , while the adjective gothic referred to medieval Gothic architecture … although this is ironic since the label Gothic had been used pejoratively in the Renaissance alluding to the destructive barbarian Goths, i.e., Gothic architecture was crude and barbaric. Gothic “horror” was an instant hit, and other writers and influencers quickly joined in creating a full-on gothic literature movement.⁸³⁸³ A model woebegone gothic novel heroine (from El Mundo ilustrado; 1879).

Wolf's Crag from Walter Scott's gothic The Bride of Lammermore

Above is an etching from a publication of Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermore (1819). Consider the sheer visual density and heaviness of the scene (click on the image to be taken to a larger version). Whence, wherefore this heaviness, this portent? Predominant is Nature being Dark in an inhospitable, threatening way. The human-built castle is primitive, isolated, and vulnerable, the riders miniscule, exposed … as though every single living cell—plant, animal, human—is clinging to life by a thread, and any dim green and blue hues of vegetation and sea are wholly irrelevant. The scene evokes danger, dysphoria, as if surely something horrific is just waiting to transpire. But again how, why? Why such darkness and what was (and still is) the appeal? Hitchcock tautologies aside, modern academe has offered theories about the socio-political-psychological landscape of the times, and yet these experts only sound supercilious and patronising from their modern triumphalist perches, as if they are searching for a disease to explain a malady, weakness to explain indulgence. No, indeed, Dark, even when crude and heavy, predominates, arrests, mystifies, the appeal all the stronger for its recessive, ungraspable spherical symmetry. To be sure, this “coming out” of gothic in the eighteenth century was overwrought, indulgent with its fright memes, but undeniably popular and onto something real about the inner human experience—at least to the Western world of those times.

The popularity of the gothic novel continued throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century primarily in the romance genre—after the term romance had evolved to mean love.⁸⁴⁸⁴ See this sorting out. Among others, Frances Parkinson Keyes (1885 – 1970) was a popular romance author who often wrote from a gothic perspective. Dragonwyck (1946) is a prime example of Hollywood⁸⁵⁸⁵ Once asked why his horror films were so popular, Alfred Hitchcock said the man on the street likes to occasionally dip his toe in the lake of horror. does gothic romance.

As personal and original as I want Novalis’ Hymns to the Night to have been, I must present Englishwoman Anna Lætitia Barbauld’s A Summer Evening’s Meditation (ASEM) as the same sort of solemn praising of the Night, but already having appeared in 1773.

Without more investigation I have no real idea if Barbauld’s ASEM, weighing in at one hundred and twenty-four lines, started what I’m calling the Night School, but as a working theory, yes, she offered eighteenth-century Britain a new perspective on Dark with an accessibility and maturity not really seen in Graveyard and certainly not gothic horror. As a sort of prompt she nods to Young’s Night-thoughts with the quote, One sun by day, by night ten thousand shine, then launches directly into her summer night and its canopy of stars

No woe, no doom-and-gloom; instead, a relentless parade of visceral and natural Dark hyperconductivity. Barbauld hauls us outdoors to partake, imbibe, behold the Night like never before. We are not swimming in doom, rather, we are touched, moved to reflect on darkness with reverence…

Night over day. Night a more expansive, passive, more nuanced interim inviting deeper, more mature human introspection. Far distant, cool and gentle are the myriad stars of a summer’s eve, unlike our single oversized and often ruinous local star of day. And here is some of my own doggerel called From a Grandniece To Her Great-aunt At Her Great-uncle’s Funeral

This is my kind of Dark, i.e., free of any campy scare tactics—fun as they may be. Most assuredly every protégé of the Dark Muse, all darkly inspired must read Barbauld’s masterpiece. Hers is an exposition of natural darkness, placing it far above the reproach of gothic horror detractors. Though ASEM was as far as I can tell a singleton, a unicorn whose influence seemed to lay dormant for decades.⁸⁷⁸⁷ …although Wordsworth would later mention Barbauld and ASEM as inspirational. One Barbauld biographer mentioned a trend of that time of ladies studying astronomy. But obviously Barbauld is waxing Dark, not just idealising celestial bodies. Perusing her other poems, yes, she often dwells on nature, sometimes in a dusky way, but addressing Dark as she did with ASEM doesn’t come forth again, and not really from others during her times. Today she is known as an influential social commentator, moralist, and educator, but not as proto-Romanticism. And so I must jump ahead some fifty years and bring in Brontëan poetry as a continuation of this Night School thread. Haworth Emily’s Stars is just one her many examples of Night School from someone who probably had never read nor heard of Barbauld’s ASEM. Exactly like Barbauld, in Stars Haworth Emily lauds the night and its starry sky

The untrammelled night sky’s depth and expanse over the harsh blaring, the tedium of daylight life, indeed. And so the last two stanzas

Night School redeems Dark by pulling it out of the ostentatiousness, the gimmickry of Graveyard and gothic. Probably started by Barbauld (until I may find evidence to the contrary), it was independently embraced by others. Let’s look at sister Anne Brontë’s Night

Simpler, more measured was Anne’s poetry than her sister’s. And she includes the grave by eulogising either of her older sisters Maria or Elizabeth, or her mother, but again, sans drama. And this calmer, more introspective Dark kept quietly maturing throughout the nineteenth century.

But let us not forget the many poems devoted to the moon. Here is Anne Brontë’s Fluctuations

Here we may imagine the youngest Brontë bowed if not weighed down by her earthly afflictions, cares, deprivations; but then in this lean, hungry, susceptible state she is caught in an emotional whirling, carried, borne up by the natural nighttime procession of sun to moon and stars. She speaks of her tearful gaze, her fainting heart, her spirits, her emotional exposure. She is a vulnerable ward of nature, but all the more tenaciously pursuant of its subtleties. Indeed, back then it was always subtleties, delicate qualities found in Nature by the vulnerable if not pathetic human, an exacting counting of seemingly modest blessings which then gained them a sublime ascendency. Oh, what we miss today…

If I weren’t pledged to Emily, I might say Anne has an even finer take on Dark than her older sister. I might dare to say Anne’s Christianity is more conventional, whereas Emily with her obvious thought-behind-thoughts mental state wound up taking a starker, more fatalist view of God. Anne humble, Emily defiant perhaps; nevertheless, the Dark Muse absolutely owned by these Brontës!

William Wordsworth was nearly always about daylit Nature, as were his foundational Romanticist ideals. Though in his A Night Thought (published 1837) he clearly intersects with Night School

Moon and Night would simply be another aspect of didactic Nature, though he does allude to the more mature subtlety brought by the darkness. Again, he has wandered into Night School in his To the Moon, here the second stanza

If I previously alluded Wordsworth concentrated on Nature over Dark, with these choice few lines he does Dark Muse very well, indeed. Sad though that he didn’t have more to say about Dark.

Allow me to mention another Night Schooler, namely, the Swiss poet Gottfried Keller. Again, he is even later by some three or four decades than the Brontës or Wordsworth. Here is his Winternacht or Winter Night

One of my favourites, I have always wondered what the protagonist did with the rest of his life. Did he return to the lake to try and find his water nymph; or did he resign himself to his mortal and mundane life? In any event, the mystery and allure of a forest in deep winter night is undeniable.⁸⁸⁸⁸ We’ll talk about liminality soon… Such magic and mystery obviously could not have occurred in daylight. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, which we will discuss below, there is a melancholy over a loss that deepens and ultimately enriches.

And so with Night School first there is Nature dark, then human reflection upon that natural Dark; indeed, recitations of the world in darkness give subtle rise to the finest, keenest insights and feelings. …to call up thoughts that shun the glare of day, indeed.

So many proofs of these “Abstract Topological Romanticism” slogs begin with this set of axiomatic equations⁹²⁹² Notably absent is Romanticism = Dark…

\begin{align*} \large{\text{Romanticism}} &= \large{\text{feelings}}, \\ \large{\text{Romanticism}} &= \large{\text{emotions}}, \\ \large{\text{Romanticism}} &= \large{\text{innocence}}, \\ \large{\text{Romanticism}} &= \large{\text{nature}} \end{align*}

for to build theorems whereby Romanticism was a spirited anti-rationalist (unrational, disrational, irrational?), predominantly vernal youthful revolt against the soulless straitjacket, the supposedly failed humanism of Enlightenment logic, as well as stodgy, urban-centric classicism … basically, anything established and coming before. Like hallucinating AI chatbots, academe spins and tangles cords and wires, connecting up Descartes, Rousseau, the American and French Revolutions, Defoe, Spinoza, Bacon, Hobbs, Shakespeare,⁹³⁹³ From the outset, the Schlegels in Jena made Shakespeare a principal proto-Romanticist, Ludwig Tieck and others of the Jena Set feverishly translating his plays into German. For me this was a clear sign they were on the wrong road. I will at some future date have my fictional character from my novel Emily of Wolkeld tell you why. … Buddha, Jesus, Merlin, the pope, etc., to form massive graphs of vertices and edges spanning the near and distant past—the denser, the more far-fetched the better. And yet this microscopic literary DNA matching is mostly happening long after the fact in a modern setting, separate, aloof, and ultimately terminally clueless. So often my beloved visionary principals are made out to be anachronistically-tagged proto-Beat, archetypal-hippie, back-to-nature, right-brain contrarian iconoclasts just doing their anti-Establishment thing.⁹⁴⁹⁴ So convenient for modern experts that Jena Romanticism came about in a for its time free-wheeling university town, many of the Jena Set also lecturers and professors at the University of Jena. Perhaps a modern version would have been Black Mountain College.

The famous Oxford professor Isaiah Berlin⁹⁵⁹⁵ Sample perhaps Isaiah Berlin’s 1965 lectures on Romanticism, published later in book form as The Roots of Romanticism. described Romanticism as

• a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms,⁹⁶⁹⁶ …my italics…
• a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness,
• a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change,
• an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life,
• a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective,
• a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.

Especially the last point makes my principals sound like children who want everything in life’s candy shop. Again, an intentionality is implied that my principals most certainly did not bring—leading us once more to the disjunction between latter-day analysts and the original, now grave-mute creators. But then the question Berlin raised at the beginning of his first lecture, namely, whether this was really a movement at all—or just a state of mind always “in the air,” emerging but then fading, as I might add, like virtual quantum particles blinking in and out of existence…

Similarly, Berlin cannot nail down what supposed adherents to Romanticism really wanted or were about. He imagines interviewing Romanticism proponents of the times

Suppose you had spoken to these persons. You would have found that their ideal of life was approximately of the following kind … integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in knowledge, or in the advance of science, not interested in political power, not interested in happiness, not interested, above all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in living at peace with your government, even in loyalty to your king or to your republic. You would have found that common sense, moderation, was very far from their thoughts.

In my humble opinion, this describes nothing. Granted, Berlin seems to cotton on to how very cryptic and fluid it all was back then. But again, he is describing just a proponent, a person in the stands—and missing what really made my principals so great. He just doesn’t get it. He mistakes the chance geometry on the forest floor for a path that really was never there.

As a writer I can say writing is difficult. I once sat down and tried to write something prose without any prior ideas, themes, or prompts. I simply asked myself over and over “What are you trying to say?” And out came a wild story of a Byronic hero, probably a ghost, pacing up and down a past-century street in eternal twilight being reclaimed by encroaching Nature. Right. I can say yes to Berlin’s not-interesteds above, but then I stand as he does before the question of What are we trying to do? In my case a dark, gothic novella popped out of all the confusion and blockage—and this long before I had gained any understanding of Dark. Such a lack of definite is quite obvious in my principals as well.

For example, much is made by latter-day experts of the “writing contest” held by Byron, the Shelleys, Mary and Percy, and John Polidori in the summer of 1816. Indeed, there could be nothing more Dark than an unnaturally (volcanic eruption-induced) cold, wet, and dark summer in a villa on Lake Geneva. If you have ever been around intelligent, creative people who are throwing around ideas, you’ll know how wild and unpredictable it can be. Out of that summer’s endeavour came Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus written by Mary Shelley,⁹⁷⁹⁷ Contrast with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s very gothic and sinister The Sandman appeared in 1817 dealing with an all-too-human mechanical automaton. The Vampyre; A Tale written by John Polidori, and Byron’s Darkness. But again, this is the literary version of quantum virtual particles coming into existence out of nowhere, with no real rhyme or reason to pack into dissertations. And though Dark was the centreing concept, all three works are really just throwbacks to gothic horror. In my estimation, they did not move the Dark needle into the red zone.

Again, the question: Where is Dark in any of academe’s Romanticism? And no, I don’t mean campy pop gothic. The feelings, the emotions, and above all, the vision Haworth Emily describes in Fall leaves fall

simply do not appear in any academic treatment of Romanticism, forcing me through this manifesto to start over from scratch. Again, Emily is not just Novalis’ poetising. When I read her Fall leaves fall, yes, they are words to be processed by my brain’s logical language model, but then they are delivered to the emotional part of my mind. This is a quasi-mirror neuron “yes, I feel this way too” moment giving me pause and transporting me once again to the gates of the Dark Muse. Fall leaves fall is its own alpha and omega, i.e., I imbibe, feel, and go forth. I behold all this sublime ideation of darkness and allow it to carry me. And it surely does, and that is all. No further work for the logical frontal cortex, let alone scholarship. Haworth Emily infects me with contagion, and I too smile and sing along with her for the Dark Muse.

Surely we all try to follow logically-set plans in our lives, logically-derived “goals.” But we are simultaneously emotional, constantly assessing how we feel about this or that, how we feel in general. This is what I might call the logic train and the emotion braid. Then when I read Fall leaves fall my braid of emotions stretching back to my birth (or even further) swells and lifts me beyond my mundane, deterministic logic train. And it is exactly this mirroring and swelling that scholars don’t get, never catch on to. Visions of snowy wreathes and night’s decay force me off my clear, well-lit logic track. But then a new sort of sight emerges, informed by my emotional faculties. And so I will share a bit of my folk psychology: All twisted, screwed-up people have one thing in common: They have attempted to strip out some strand, cut out a section of their emotion braid. Thus, they are emotionally short-circuiting. They lack emotional continuity thus vision. And so when dealing with academe’s cutting around on Romanticism I must, as Amherst Emily said, Beware of the surgeon with his knife, lest he find the culprit life.

The indoorsmen of academe never fail to raise nature up as a hallmark of Romanticism. It’s nature, nature, nature—but with only the most patronising view of what it meant to my principals. Nature what? Nature awareness, appreciation, adulation, respect, idealisation, idolisation, rapture, fervour, worship. And so Nature becomes their metaphor supply closet,⁹⁸⁹⁸ More about pathetic fallacy soon. a source of inspiration, a cruel mistress, a loving mother—an hallucinogenic drug… All of this gets batted around endlessly, again, making my principals seem soppy, dreamy, sentimental, their lines see-through by us greater, wiser modernist grownups. Academe does not, cannot understand Nature as I’ve described it above, i.e., a non-place; instead, the constant everything everywhere cycles of birth, growth, deterioration, and Death.

Academe’s favourite Romanticism nature boy is of course William Wordsworth, whom so many call Romanticism’s godfather⁹⁹⁹⁹ …due to ignorance of Novalis? Alas… —but then routinely pan as a sappy sentimentalist. Scholars are creatures of their times too, beholden unto the modern age and its shallow urban-bound nihilist-tainted public. Thus, they cannot help but use as touchstones modern realist writers such as Jack London and Ernest Hemingway and their supposedly more objective and unvarnished realist understanding of nature. Thus, whatever Wordsworth said about wandering like a cloud and going nuts over daffodils is seen as affected, mushy, maudlin

Borrowdale rainforest in Wordsworth's beloved Lake District.

Eye rolls, smirks, and tsk-tsking in today’s English department classrooms. The fonder Wordsworth’s waxing, the further he sinks into our patronisation and condemnation. Missed entirely is his subtle and sublime. Here from Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

Modernism has no concept of, no use for affections, for serene and blessed moods, of seeing into the life of things. Of course Wordsworth is genial here. He goes to the heart and soul of what I want to bring forth here at WutheringUK, even though he hasn’t included Dark. With words he causes great vibrations to my emotion braid by claiming membership to the greater realm of Nature—as I would. He’s a thankful man, which is so foreign to the ego-, anthropocentric modernist triumphalist today. In tandem modern science distances humans from its machine-like concept of the environment. And so a false pseudo-objectivity comes home to roost. A scholar in the Wikipedia article on Tintern Abbey complains of Wordsworth ignoring the reality of the times

[Wordsworth manages] to see into the life of things only by narrowing and skewing his field of vision and by excluding certain conflictual sights and meanings.

Obviously, Wordsworth was a toxic male apologist for the patriarchal capitalist industrialist imperialist system, ignoring that so very many women and minorities were being oppressed exactly as privileged he gazed so narrowly upon those sights and penned those lines… And so Wordsworth is just a dusty old statue glimpsed during a quick run-through the classic wing of the museum, much more interesting, much better things in the modern wing for sure. Alas…

Most condemned, Wordsworth tried to make nature the main house for human purity and innocence. In To a Highland Girl he transforms a peasant shepherdess he encountered on a trip to Scotland into a demi-angel

I guess you had to be there…

And so nature for modern academe is never more than a theme, a leitmotif, thus, a piece of the very oxymoron-ish “creative machinery”—bereft of any clue as to what Nature as I capitalise it means.¹⁰⁰¹⁰⁰ …and again there is certainly no inkling of what I spoke of above about the modern indoor-outdoor dichotomy. Nature conducive to feelings and innocence, inviting re-sensitisation … poetry as nothing more than someone describing what they see and how it makes them feel and yearn … but then modern realism mired in nihilism not able to abide any of this and actively trying to purge it.

If one rejects metaphysics in all forms, then Nature has no magic. Ironic is how naturalism means nature sans any metaphysics, i.e., completely materialist mechanistic from the micro to the macro. Though the term has the root natural, i.e., the feel of instinctive, genuine, candid, sincere, e.g., the smile of a dear friend… Woe. Alas.

As I just said, Nature observed was often nothing more than noted, listed reverently in verse, as does Anne Brontë in her Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day

I see my principals instinctively, unknowingly, belatedly stamping a new European nature worship out of the moors and forest floors—necessarily independent of whatever had been the brutish vernacular paganisms before Roman occupation … orthogonal as well to Elizabethan pastoral lyric, German Shepherd Poetry of the post-Thirty Years War seventeenth century, or even the Greek Arcadian Bucolic traditions. They found something entirely new.

Nature, but capitalised. Then to explore how very nuanced their Nature was. Here is a quote from Haworth Emily

All creation is equally mad. Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live. Yet nonetheless we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for having entered such a world.

In my opinion, this says it all. Later I will dive into the three poems which I believe describe this seemingly simple but portentously paradoxical observation best. And again, her Nature is completely different from our modern scientific and locational ideas thereof.

Besides Nature, the modern ivory tower wants my principals, as for example Berlin argues, to have been more in tune with their senses, more impulsive, less emotionally suppressed—out to downright sensual.¹⁰¹¹⁰¹ …they always trot out Byron for Romanticism = sensual. And once again these modernist scholars so often come off as patronising, like developmental psychologists describing children. I am constantly confronted with how they so widely miss what being instinctual and creative was back in the so-called Romantic Era. Regrettable how one sort of gifted—the analytical intellectual—is unable to fathom another sort of gifted—the artistic lyrical.

Though from an historical socio-psychological standpoint we may only guess (badly?) at what creative, sensitive people in those times saw, thought, felt. What did the escalating Industrial Revolution, as well as British imperialism mean to people at the dawn of the nineteenth century? I posit these external factors set off dehumanising and ultimately desensitising reverberations throughout society, felt keenest by my brightest, most sensitive people. We today are at quite different levels of accommodating the awful, at normalising, relativising, turning on numbness to the bad around us. But as the eighteenth century was ending, moral and emotional disassociation was not so advanced, reactions more spontaneous and honest. And to be sure, they were affronted by what humanity was doing, where we were going.

We may all agree that my hyper-sensitive principals did not personally experience human exploitation, colonialism, capitalist industrialism, and yet they knew of it and shrunk back in horror. In their own fashion they became crypto-reactionary against it. What was conscious, what subconscious in Wordsworth’s mind as he sat above the Tintern Abbey ruins? Indeed, all of the negative things supposedly swirling around—the burgeoning British Empire, the proto-indstrialism havoc all around the River Wye and environs. And yet his response was limbic pondering. Of course academe is masterful at describing the historicity, the paradigms and movements. They make the backdrop of Enlightenment’s cold, relentless dynamism and reductionist determinism visible in contrast. But we miss today the visceral, the emotional aspect so sorely needed. And so I say, It takes a poet to know a poet, and it takes a special, time-travelling poet to know these special Romantic Era poets.

But then dare I, your guide, claiming poetic skill, be so critical of established, studied Romantic Era professors? Following is something I wrote in the spirit

This might have won me an honourable mention back in the day, perhaps a dinner invite. But I seriously doubt any contemporary Romanticism experts could have written such lines—half because they could not, half because to such they would not deign.

Yes, my poets of yore. And as Berlin noted, no political stance was ever intended; rather, by trying to re-humanise, re-sensitise, à la Novalis’ poetising, theirs would be a far more subversive phenomenon as only, for example, some new belief system or “underground movement” can be. Socio-political templates do not highlight my principals, rather, they smother them. But if, say, Emily Dickinson meant nothing political or even religious, no consciously declared lifestyle or paradigm, what did she mean, what did any of them mean or want? To me what they did and said seem ethereal and extra-human. Ironically, my principals were drafting behind the general Calvinist Christian wake of the time, ultimately deferring to God. Indeed, God. Here is Emily Dickinson poetising belief

But even then the spirit would be shot out of the aether. One fallout due to the Wordsworths’ and Coleridge’s poetical regionalism was the Lake District becoming the modern world’s first eco-literature tourism destination, now a national park with sixteen million visitors a year.¹⁰²¹⁰² In 1810 he published Guide to the Lakes, which kicked off Lake District tourism fever in earnest. Rail access began in 1846 and 1847. Again, we find none of Hemingway’s adventure and danger in Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere¹⁰³¹⁰³ The Wordsworths’ Dove Cottage near Grasmere, Cumbria.

And so he is more what many today might in slight call Cottagecore than, e.g., Jack London’s cast of wolves ripping throats in his relentlessly savage, slant-anthropomorphic White Fang. So many of the tourists to Tintern Abbey or the Lake District expect to feel something of what Wordsworth felt, extra-experiential to the unique scenery itself. They want to be moved like he was moved.

As a teen growing up in the early 1970s, I, like so many around me, fell under the spell of the strange and mysterious Kung Fu, an American TV series premiering in 1972. For a kid in Tennessee Kung Fu was a pop introduction to Eastern religion and philosophy. The main character, Kwai Chang Caine, was a Chinese-American orphan raised in a Chinese Shaolin Buddhist monastery circa mid-1800s, who as a young man escaped China to America after killing an aristocrat. Orphan Caine was taught the Kung Fu martial arts style, but also the whole Buddhist pacifist, non-resistant approach to life, both of which he embodies, episode after episode, as he roams about the American Wild West of the mid-nineteenth century as an aesthete itinerant on the run from the Chinese government.

Wanting to know more, I found a book on Zen Buddhism where I found the concept of Unsui, which is Japanese and means cloud, water. The term also refers to a novice monk

In Japan, one receives unsui ordination at the beginning of formal ordained practice, and this is often perceived as ’novice ordination.’

This dense, written-for-adults book further described unsui metaphorically, saying water exhibits perfect passive resistance, i.e., it changes states if challenged: as water it flows around impediments; as steam it evaporates away from heat; if blocked or dammed, it simply waits supremely patient; if frozen, likewise, waits—but nothing can stop its eventual movement to the sea. But now I see this as irrelevant to my Dark Muse, a false path, so to speak.

Kung Fu begins with Caine as a young man revenge killing a nobleman who has senselessly killed his beloved master. Which of course is the antithesis of the Buddhist way; hence, Caine must leave the monastery, and China as well, heading to America. I remember we were all enthralled with Kwai Chang’s adventures; kids and adults alike all looked forward to each new episode. And yet looking back I can now say with assurance this extreme Eastern pacifism is not for me.

Buddhism wants enlightenment—which supposedly raises us to a higher trans-human state. For example, once enlightened we no longer should be dragged down by worldly cares, needs, desires, hassles. But how many actually reach this state, which sounds to me like some quasi-permanent version of Dostoyevski’s presence of eternal harmony? This is why I cannot take seriously any sort of Eastern religion with the stated goal of enlightenment, if for no other reason than so very few people ever arrive at this self-actualization. And where is my Dark in the East? Say what you will about it, the Calvinist-flavoured Christianity of the Brontë sisters might just be the house spirituality of my Dark Muse.

But can there be a Western Zen? To be sure, Emily Brontë’s All creation is equally mad… presents a deep koan-like paradox. Which would seem to fall into fatalism and stoicism rather than offering any guarantees to higher consciousness. Buddhism promises relief from suffering. My Dark, however, “works with suffering.”

My principals never sought to offer anything as spiritually comprehensive as Buddhism, no sort of spiritual path to higher anything. They held seeds, not finished canned goods. They expanded on Sturm und Drang, but did not draw out any sort of architectural plans. Yes, interaction with, movement in Nature; but no political or spiritual paradigms towards specified goals for the mundane world. They lived haphazardly, spoke in fragments, resulting in anti-comprehensive. One final observation of Goethe was similar: He was central to this time, but centralised nothing. He too saw Nature as everything, if for nothing more than endless empirical study as did his dear friend Alexander von Humboldt. As Goethe notes, Nature has endless facets impossible to comprehend as a whole…

Nature has no system, she has, she is life and consequence from an unknown centre out to an unrecognisable perimeter.

And how could just poetised feelings—Longfellow’s piteous ruing of snowflakes, Novalis’ swooning over the night—counter all the violent dog-eat-dog of mad creation, all the smashing, banging, clanging, all the shouting, wailing, arguing of real world Britain going on over the moorland horizon? While Goethe assuredly did, my principals never attempted to own or direct the aesthetics of their times. What then could have been the artistic, aesthetic compliment to colonialism, Newtonian science, capitalist industrialism, Marxist revolution?

And therein lies so much of the irony and paradox of what my principals stirred up. What sense did naming William “Dances With Daffodils” Wordsworth poet laureate of the British Empire make?¹⁰⁴¹⁰⁴ …named in 1843. No, indeed, what the Romantic Era poets and artists created was, as we might categorise (sic) it, a very underground aesthetic, an anti-movement that blanched and faded in the presence of political struggles, that called no seekers, no bhikkhus, no one torturing themselves into the lotus position to higher spiritual planes. Grim was the new industrial urban world where the once blithely subsistence peasants had become wage slaves living in the misery of urban squalor, hunger, and exploitation. Homo homini lupus ¹⁰⁵¹⁰⁵ Man is a wolf to man. had raised its terrible head in a new and awful way. The radical philosophers, as the proto-Marxist activists were called by some, attacked seeking power from the wealthy, i.e., the modern haves versus the have-nots. Marxist dialectics insisted that when the gradient became too great necessarily the revolution will begin.¹⁰⁶¹⁰⁶ Some might call Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England published in 1845 the beginning of Marxism. But my principals seemed mute. Or were they?

Even so, many opposed what Romanticism seemed to be doing and saying. Goethe and Schiller promoted as an alternative their Weimar Classicism (More about Goethe and Schiller later.). To their thinking, classicism was the best compliment to modern man. But then what aesthetic could compliment imperialism? Obviously an art touting glory, majesty, splendor, regality, grandeur to justify, substantiate whatever terrible happenings were going on out in the real world, out on the imperial frontiers. Even more poignant was the classicist envelope around religion, elevating the huge paradox of pious, compassionate Christianity as a seemingly stop-at-nothing empire’s real underlying humanistic intentions. All in all, Romanticism could not be applied anywhere except perhaps on a walk in Wordworth’s Lake District, or from the Brontë’s Haworth over the moors to the Top Withens ruins. The Wordsworths offered a new sort of membership to Nature strange and mysterious, and whether we hold dual citizenship with the current human race was not considered. So very ironically, Britain seemed to be saying “Wordsworth is who we truly are,” ruing silently perhaps absentee capitalism for its environmental destruction and imperialism for its lack of humble nativism. A Britain dominant and ascending seemingly knew it was going against its true self, violating its warranty.

Germany likewise was in political as well as aesthetic uncertainty and turmoil.

In 1806, Napoleon conquered Prussia. French troops occupied and sacked Weimar, where Goethe had lived since 1775. They broke into Goethe’s house; many of his friends lost everything. Still, Goethe reconciled himself to Napoleon’s empire, which he regarded as a legitimate successor to the Holy Roman Empire.
—from Shannon Selin, Napoleonic-era historic novelist

This acceptance of Napoleon’s vaguely hinted at republicanism and supposed modernisations led many German intellectuals to accept whatever destruction the French invasion caused, for in the end the crazy quilt of backwards German postage-stamp principalities would finally be forced into the “modern era.”¹⁰⁷¹⁰⁷ German mediatisation brought on by Napoleonic conquest of the so-called Germanic Holy Roman Empire reduced, secularlised, and consolidated the German states from 300 down to 39. Or so the thinking went. But not all were on board. For example, leading Romanticist painter Caspar David Friedrich with his Der Chasseur im Walde¹⁰⁸¹⁰⁸ Friedrich’s enigmatic Der Chasseur im Walde, 1814


(The Chasseur [soldier] in the Forest) from 1814 depicts a sort of comeuppance for arrogant French modernisation against timeless, indomitable German Nature. His visual metaphor has a single French soldier apparently under a spell, obviously lost and separated from the French retreat from Russia, while the symbol of doom, the raven, waits. If any fine artist understood Dark, it was Caspar David Friedrich. Perusing his works, we see he never stoops to fright memes, but delivers an exquisitely liminal darkness.

I’m a nostalgic guy for sure. But not about dentistry. I don’t want any retro-, old-fashion dentistry.
—anonymous comedian

Novalis the philosopher promoted a nostalgia for the Medieval Era—which only confused his contemporaries. Likewise, Walpole was all in for medieval in his more melodramatic way. Later, critiques of Jane Eyre chided its nostalgic, rustic appeal for English moorlands. All Brontëan writing has the thread of rootedness to the land, which should be timeless, but then was often seen as all too twee nostalgic. What then is going on with nostalgia? What are we doing when we are nostalgic?

The Brontë sisters languished in obscurity most of their lives,¹⁰⁹¹⁰⁹ Oddly enough, the Brontës are completely left out of many key academic analyses of Romanticism. For example, Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp, Beach’s The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, and Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism make no mention of them! Maybe they had read Virginia Woolf’s comments on Jane Eyre and had given them up for a bad job. See this analysis as well. Big cringe. More soon… but as they gradually gained popular recognition in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Victorian Neo-Romantics kept up with portraying a softer, kinder Britain from the capitalist industrialist, imperialist militarist reality. Miss Jane Eyre, suspected of fairy ancestry, incessantly asked, Who and what am I? Which was answered, “You are a charge of the land and your people.” Thus was my delicate bundle of English Zen, Dark, Nature, and Christianity tied together by the Brontë sisters. But could it last, could it hold up against the avalanche of realism and modernism coming out of industrialism in the Late Victorian Age? Or, from a different angle let us ask, How did Romanticism die? Or again, how was it driven back underground?

Consider the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in 1848, an arguably Neo-Romantic effort. Below is a later painting of John Everett Millais, his An Idyll of 1745

Before internet social media and hysterical helicopter parents...

Millais is dealing in what I call profane or vulgar nostalgia, as opposed to sacred nostalgia, which is a hearkening, yearning for the profoundly eternal and epic such as mythos and legend. Either way, nostalgia should not be seen as merely escapism to the past. And yet we surely will not have our emotion bundles thrummed as Millais thrummed emotion bundles of that time. Of course the Britain of 1745 had power—after favourable political events (e.g., Treaty of Utrecht) and Robert Walpole’s era as prime minister. 1745 was the year of the main Jacobite rebellion; hence, the patriotic theme? In general, this was not yet sovereign, domineering Britain; rather, a Britain still fighting and scrapping for its position in the world, mainly against the French, as well as still suffering the collective PTSD of Jacobitism and the bloody seventeenth-century British civil wars less than a hundred years earlier. Still, Millais painting this in 1884 would hearkened back, however vulgarly, to, yes, an idyllic time—at least as he thought provided by the seemingly eternal English countryside, raised up above all as Britain’s first and foremost national treasure. In the semi-wild setting are three innocent, tabula rasa peasant girls enraptured by an enlisted man playing a flute, while a fatherly high-born officer looks on admiringly. Clearly, this pastoral and class bliss was a version of Britain longed for by the nostalgia-heavy, Romanticism-influenced Pre-Raphaelites. Great ruing and regretting permeated Victorian parlour society vis-à-vis the real world, spurring them to search the earlier Romantic Era and to see in nature vitality and salvation. Notice beside Millais’ The Blind Girl.¹¹⁰¹¹⁰ Millais’ The Blind Girl (1854-56)


This was the down-home England they sought and idealised over the harsh realities of colonialism and imperialism, the horrific suffering of the urban industrial wastelands Charles Dickens came to chronicle over and over throughout this time.

“English Zen” and English nostalgia against the unrelenting brutality of the world. Romanticism’s right bookend was supposedly 1850. But did it die, retire, was it replaced? No, no, and no—in part, I would say, exactly because it was never anything as intentional and wrappable boxable as the watchers and minders wanted it to be. Romanticism like an ongoing silent-bid auction always interrupted just before the sale. Was nostalgia-heavy Tennyson a Romanticist? What about Yeats’ The Stolen Child from 1889

I should also mention James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian, like Walpole’s Otranto, was the supposed field collections of the legendary Celtic bard Oisín, although most scholars believe Macpherson largely composed the poems himself, drawing in part on traditional Gaelic poetry he had researched. As Wikipedia says

Though the stories “are of endless battles and unhappy loves”, the enemies and causes of strife are given little explanation and context. Characters are given to killing loved ones by mistake, and dying of grief, or of joy. There is very little information given on the religion, culture or society of the characters, and buildings are hardly mentioned. The landscape “is more real than the people who inhabit it. Drowned in eternal mist, illuminated by a decrepit sun or by ephemeral meteors, it is a world of greyness.”

Yes, Dark, but clearly more of the predominant Medieval Age nostalgia of the eighteenth century, especially since the authenticity is highly suspect, i.e., wishful and aggrandising penning on MacPherson’s part.

Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. Julia Margaret Cameron, half of her life spent after 1850, conjured nostalgia in her ground-breaking photography with its soft-focus and historical themes.¹¹¹¹¹¹ Alethea, by Julia Margaret Cameron (1872)


Nostalgia, originally a medical condition,¹¹²¹¹² Nostalgia, from Latin, literally means homesickness and was an acknowledged medical condition in the 1800s. morphed into the social-psychological phenomenon of idolising the past, vulgar nostalgia selectively reviving, reanimating hoped-for aspects of the past. Nostalgia’s motivation? Again, eighteenth-century gothic doom coincided with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution’s inflexion point, as well as the ghastly reverberations of colonialism, e.g., slavery. Doom, indeed, where sin’s ever-compounding interest overwhelms any short-term profits or gains. Here is how J.R.R. Tolkien responded when his fantasy writings were called escapist

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?

He went on to say the prisoner’s natural urge is to escape and run home. Where is this home? Granted, the intersection of nostalgia and Dark is minimal, but I say mist dims light, softens lines, and all nostalgia involves the obscurants mist and shadow. Nostalgia is mainly for the thrumming of the emotion braid and not in the least the calibration of the logic train. But yes, home—perhaps the home Jane Eyre described with the Rivers family on the Northern moorlands? Tolkien as a Neo-Victorian Luddite closet-Monarchist was the next stepping stone after George MacDonald, Tolkien’s idol. So who is a stepping stone after Tolkien, who before MacDonald?… But yes, it is always about home. Ursula Le Guin said an adult is not a dead child, rather a child that survived. But can that child in us take a faery hand-in-hand and return to the water and the wild? Faerie as a hyper-idealised home paralleling Eden? Consider Elizabeth Siddal, (1829 - 1862)¹¹³¹¹³ Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, ca. 1860; the original super model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters.


model, artist, poetess, her Gone

Indeed, this living, this witnessing to know what is gone train-like into the past. Then her Lord May I Come?

Whether the propriety of sacred nostalgia or the handy, heart-warming profane nostalgia, the eighteenth century saw Nostalgia capitalised as the West sought to witness a home of yore, necessarily bound to the land and honouring the memories of the ancestors. And all this rather darkly. Indeed, Miss Siddal, we live to know what is gone.

With an ever-faster-spinning planet there is antagonism, chafing with

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
—John 3:8

And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.
—Ecclesiastes 1:13

…humanity born of Spirit forever feeling wind in our faces and circling around wisdom … almost as if we may find a sanctity in what may emerge from such consciousness above behaviorist stimulus-response, action-reaction, beyond the modern gauge of the personal logic train, besides the day’s to-dos—orderings, changes, updates, progress. It’s a battle of feeling versus logic for sure. Vulnerability versus hubris. Retreat through the mists to the land versus a well-lit, outward-facing conquering spirit.

Perhaps my Romantic Era principals sensed the hyper-individualistic, the utilitarian, the reptilian mindset coming at them from the middle-class capitalist industrialists and saw it rightly as an egregious desensitisation regime spreading throughout society. And so they threw re-sensitisation at it. The stereotypical middle-class industrialist rising during the Enlightenment was a pragmatic utilitarian who, after absorbing the message of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), had shucked off noblesse oblige,¹¹⁴¹¹⁴ Luke 12:48: For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more. the New Testament beatitudes, and any lingering other-century nostalgia and sentimentality to forge ahead as the consummate self-reliant individualist laser-focused on financial wealth. These men projected a stripped-down emotional psychological persona, indeed, a new desensitisation regime. Capitalism, Marxism, modernism in general, dispensed with traditional aesthetics, forcing my principals to shore up an aesthetical foundation. But as I say, there was no call to political action, and really no prescription of aesthetics either, just their fatalist, nostalgic Englishness. But could they succeed? Could they place something of value on a level above the fray?

Too often Romanticism scholars are all over the map with theories. For example, Andrea Wulf in her Magnificent Rebels depicts Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a sort of adult-supervision den dad of the Jena Set, and yet here is something he actually said about Romanticism

Klassisch ist das Gesunde, romantisch das Kranke …
or
… Romanticism is disease. It is the weak, the sickly, the battle cry of a school of wild poets and Catholic reactionaries; whereas classicism is strong, fresh, gay, sound, like Homer and the Nibelungenlied.

I won’t accuse Wulf of poor research or intentional obfuscation. Having been a founder of Sturm und Drang, Goethe might have been of two minds. Perhaps he was initially attracted to all the buzz around Jena, all the haute pensée sprung up in his backyard, but then soured on its content, implications, clashed with the personalities behind it. Certainly Schiller did. Still, Wulf’s is a prime example of how diverse, even contradictory Romantic Era scholarship can be.

To be sure, many contemporaries of the actual artistic producers helped talk Romanticism into existence—the Jena Set, Coleridge, Germaine de Staël, Emerson in America, et al.—but again, I believe the actual principals were far-sighted, inward-gazing, quasi-timeless unicorns not following guidelines nor living up to anybody’s expectations.¹¹⁶¹¹⁶ …e.g., the Brontës were pastor’s daughters in rural West Yorkshire with little exposure to (taint from?) the cultural and literary buzz of the cities. … and most certainly they did not “write to spec” or pastiche, as was fairly obviously the case with gothic horror novelists. And so I say once more sifting through all the academic chaff gets us nowhere versus simply reading and silently contemplating the product itself. All for naught is the listing of facts, dates, and figures, creating categories and pigeonholes, imagining commonalities, generalities, throwing a formulaic hyperspace over my lone wolf creators. Caveat emptor, I say. If the purpose of a poem, as Keats said, is to embolden the soul to accept mystery, then such the typical academic death march must be seen as counterproductive. For me at least, my principals re-sensitised, while their describers and explainers have only managed to de-sensitise with their insensitive approach.

Some insight to this antagonism comes from two men of that era who unfortunately wore both creator and explainer hats: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edgar Allan Poe. With them we see their creations take us into the ephemeral mists of Romanticism’s subtleties and sublimities, while their intellectualizations and pontifications thereof only sound windy, if not shrill out to ridiculous.¹¹⁷¹¹⁷ Today we have the concept of left-brain, right-brain, as often enough nothing else can describe this split-personality confusion. The best ideas about left/right brain are those of Iain McGilchrist. Try these. And yet the urban salons of the time necessarily trafficked in rational, left-brain talk and copy. And this is for me the crisis of Romanticism, i.e., the huge divide between the creators and their content versus their contemporary describers and promoters. And so I say yes Mr Keats, we shall luxuriate long in the water, but then slowly, gently swim back to the shore to gracefully and silently rise out of the water and stand on the bank exulted for the whole experience. Of course we cannot luxuriate in the lake forever, but upon dry land we must somehow hold the experience in awe and reverence and not grasp for logical explanations, which can only turn it into a show, a farce, even so, a sham, a carcass.

Today a hit song or a TikTok video can go globally “viral” in less than a day, with imitations instantly springing up like mushrooms after rain. However, in the closing years of the eighteenth century there just seemed to be something in the air, which, as noted earlier, came to be called Romanticism, apparently first by Jena Set founder Friedrich Schlegel¹¹⁸¹¹⁸ This will save you some googling. Again, note especially the tortured, left-brained origin of the term romantic. The prima facie seeds were works from Coleridge and Wordsworth’s collaboration Lyrical Ballads (first edition) appearing in 1798 and Novalis’ HttN in 1800. And yet my principle principal, Emily Brontë, wrote decades later and arguably knew very little if not absolutely nothing about Jena, Novalis—or even much of Coleridge and Wordsworth other than perhaps a reading of their Lyrical Ballads. Then later, Poe is said to have encountered translations of Ludwig Tieck’s short stories. Otherwise, cross-fertilisation was a sketchy thing. For example, brother and sister William and Dorothy Wordsworth spent some seven months in Germany between 1898 and 1899, but were there only to save money and perhaps learn German. They apparently had no idea of Novalis or Jena Romanticism starting up at that time!

What is called Early German Romanticism¹¹⁹¹¹⁹ For what it’s worth, German Romanticism can be broken down into Jena, Heidelberg, then Berlin Romanticism based largely on the principle artists. began when Novalis’ HttN burst upon the scene in the very first year of the nineteenth century. Clear to me, however, is that HttN was a one-off that came out of the blue, thus, certainly not intentional, positioned for, or tailored to any specific trend or agenda. Contrast this with Goethe’s play Iphigenia in Tauris (versions in 1779, 1781, 1786), based on Euripides’ original and specifically meant to showcase Goethe’s ideal of modern classicism, i.e., his and Friedrich Schiller’s Weimar Classicism.¹²⁰¹²⁰ Again, Goethe would criticise Romanticism harshly, but attempted to bridge proto-Romanticm Sturm und Drang with his new classicism. Enter the Jena Set, centred around the Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich, along with August’s wife Caroline, who seized upon the mostly absentee Novalis as their boy wonder Liebling mascot—and the conflation of producer and describers began in earnest. But just one year after HttN appeared, Novalis died on them. Though the seed had sprouted and the Jena Set went on to create an entire mountain range of Jena Romanticism which had little to do with their boy-man hero Novalis’ scattered utterances and writings. After philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte fell out of favour, the young, dynamic Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling came on board, and it is his nature philosophy which became Jena Romanticism’s house brand, eventually adopted and promoted by Coleridge (sometimes as literal translation as in his Biographia Literaria - 1817), then by Emerson and the Transcendentalists in the Colonies. Again, all of this stamping and churning misses Dark entirely! Thus, right from the start Dark is obscured behind a wall of theorising and intellectualisations.

Dark Romanticism (DR) would be an even more unfortunate academe box for containing the adjective dark. At its centre was supposedly Edgar Allan Poe.¹²¹¹²¹ Daguerreotype of Poe 1849
Alas but the Wikipedia description of DR trots out all the negative stereotypes of Dark. As one biographer noted, Poe struggled all his short adult life to make a living as a writer and poet. One supposed quote of his said

Your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib.

My take on Poe was that, as I said above, he led a Dr Jekyll Mr Hyde literary existence. The American publishing world was rarely supportive, as the biographer said, eager to move on from anything gothic. And yet Poe always seemed to amaze and find audiences.

Poe’s best known poem was The Raven, which wound through the publishing world—mainly periodicals and newspapers—throughout 1845, finally landing in a collection of Poe’s poems in the summer of 1845. And by the twentieth century, school children would learn by heart at least the first stanza

and if you were a good student, perhaps even the second stanza

then of course …’Tis the wind and nothing more… and other such evocative snatches. For youth poetry reciting contests, The Raven has been a standard. But through all this we have what is basically a throwback to the doom-and-gloom Graveyard School gothic, i.e., not informed by, e.g., Barbauld’s finer sort of Dark.

Following The Raven came Poe’s fateful essay entitled The Philosophy of Composition wherein he attempted to reverse-engineer what he did to come up with The Raven. Here’s a portion

I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven, the bird of ill-omen, monotonously repeating the one word “Nevermore” at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object- supremeness or perfection at all points, I asked myself, “Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death, was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is obvious, “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

Alas, but I just cannot accept that he created The Raven on some mechanised poetry conveyor belt, speaking of Death capitalised, then death of a woman almost as if a gimmick. Again, alas. It gets worse

Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view, at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable, at the cautious selections and rejections, at the painful erasures and interpolations—in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders, and demon-traps, the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio [actor, player].

Cringe. He sounds ashamed about falling into a state of “ecstatic intuition,” as if he is surrounded by peers around whom he had better not sound too airy-floaty. Or maybe he wanted to say, “’Twas nothing. Just follow my formula, and you too can write a nice, dark poem that’ll have them all weeping.” Once more, cringe.

Personally, I do believe The Raven came from something ecstatic—out to trance and vision. Again, Poe was simply an erratic character who seemed to change personalities often. But sometimes I want The Raven to be about the death of Romanticism. If academe says the last breath escaped circa 1850, then perhaps I could read into the lines a lamenting of the passing of an era symbolised by a beautiful, virtuous woman Leanore. Allow me, please.

And so here I want to make a very important point about my principals, to be sure, that they were only vessels, those particular mortals the Muses chose to be their emissaries. This angle is well developed in the Hollywood film Amadeus where Mozart¹²²¹²² Child Wolfgang and sister Maria Anna


was depicted as an immature, outta-control brat all the same the conduit of heavenly music. As alluded above, Novalis was likely just such a boy-wonder Amadeus sort, Poe often enough mercurial, Emily Brontë austere anorexic, Emily Dickinson a spinster recluse. Looking too closely into their personal stories gets us no closer to discovering the origins of their inspiration—in other words, another academe dead end so leave off already! As writer and artist Kahil Gibran said about children in his The Prophet, they come through you, they are not of you.

Though Poe’s own descriptions of his “place of creative origin” was surprisingly insightful. He once mentioned the state of having “thoughts behind thoughts.” Which is something I found described in a Der Spiegel article from 2012 about the link between creativity and schizophrenia. Basically, an “expression” of the gene Neuregulin 1 (NRG1), which supposedly is key in regulating “synaptic plasticity” can sometimes be amiss, but not so amiss that full-on schizophrenia results. Instead of full debilitation with phantom voices and raging paranoia, a “schizoid lite” sufferer will have the hidden underground river of wild disassociated thoughts, but be able to control it, even tap into it. Once I read this Der Spiegel article scales fell from my eyes—it described me! Here is an example of a poem I wrote

As far as describing my creative process I remember becoming fixated upon a nighttime scene of a narrow, winding, cobblestone, other-century street and a small theatre therein. And the rest simply came from the underground river of thought rumour below my direct consciousness. For further evidence I might add a section of my novel Emily of Wolkeld. Here is Emily describing her special place

She gazed once more at the broken outline of Wolkeld Hall through the trees, letting her concentration slip and her eyes glaze. She listened after that strange place in her mind from which bits and pieces of scenes played beyond her comprehension, where shadows of thoughts never quite became clear. Though at times something would suddenly stand before her and demand her best attempt at a poetisation.

Since Kansas, since puberty, she would occasionally find herself slipping into some further space beyond the secret compartments. But again, she could only sense, partially comprehend this expansive, twilit region, fleeting, but long dominating her heart and mind. At first she considered such flights just intense day-dreaming, but over time they became less imagined, more a definite communion with a distinctly separate realm. It was a dusky world, steeped in sublime melancholic loneliness, often large and panoramic. At first she found it worrisome—not some clear religious transport of light and ecstasy. And yet she came to believe good was speaking, not evil, nor for that matter any sort of lurking mental illness. She wished it to be something of her soul’s true home, perhaps some distant view of Cumbria—at least that was the place to which she always mapped it, for which she yearned immediately thereafter.

The queen of this sort of Schizophrenia Lite™ is of course Emily Dickinson, whose lines often disappear into this underground region. Reading her hundreds of little one-, two-, three-stanza bursts leaves me certain she was definitely Schizo-lite™

Bright gems, one after the other, poured out of that terribly gentle, unimaginably deep woman. Sigh…

Now, on to what I consider Poe’s best poem, namely, Annabel Lee

Annabel Lee from Julian Peters Comics

If there is a better American example of the Dark Muse, I don’t know it. Here Poe is contemplative melancholic, rather than flogging fright as he does in his prose. I wonder if Poe knew of Novalis and his supposed one hundred nights of graveside vigilance for deceased Sophie von Kühn? Perhaps, but irrelevant. Again, I suss out that both Poe and Emily Brontë grasped the Dark Muse and found expression through their poetry—but, again, so ironically, not through their prose where they could only fall back into gothic. And so I fall back to poetry and fragmented bursts as the only vehicle of true Dark.

I would add that Poe, of my principle principals, was undoubtedly the best educated and informed. He would have known Greek mythology best, i.e., all about Thanatos, Nyx, Hypnos, the Underworld and, in general, the classic Greek proto-gothic take on death and night. And yet he delivers in his Annabel Lee our new sort of Dark Muse.¹²³¹²³ Academe is also wont to play around with Freud’s death drive (Todestrieb), another red herring completely antithetical to everything I’m about here with WutheringUK. If anyone didn’t get feelings and poetisation as my principals saw it, that would be Sigmund Freud.

The German poetess Annette Freiin von Droste zu Hülshoff (1797 - 1848)¹³⁵¹³⁵ Baroness Annette von Droste-Hülshoff


in her Der Knabe im Moor (The boy on the moor first appearing in 1842)¹³⁶¹³⁶ Gerhard Wedepohl’s illustration for Der Knabe im Moor


likewise speaks of Nature’s power as darkness descends. However, Droste means to bring to us the fear of nature as a superstitious peasant lad would experience it. Here is my free prose translation of the first stanza

…so ominously forsaken, so frighteningly forsaken. But whence this ominous, frightening, and forsaken? Whence the backdrop of superstitions? Droste narrates a commoner lad’s frightful trip at twilight across a semi-wild section of his early-nineteenth century Westphalian lowlands, describing in horrifying detail how the landscape would seem to come alive with terrible demonic threats. In the next five verses the boy succumbs in his growing panic to fantasies of evil spirits and actors, but in the end makes it back—with perhaps some help from his guardian angel—to Christian civilization. I bring up Der Knabe here because both Brontë and Droste are working with Nature as a liminal phase which eclipses a known, mundane, daylit locality, becoming either a spell-binding gate to a higher realm or a downright frightening reintroduction to the forbidden pagan past.

In both cases the landscape is not some far-removed trackless wilderness only approachable by Victorian explorers, rather, more likely just marginal, abandoned spaces due to distance or poor growing conditions. To be sure, these are not pre-historic times when the dominant forests were wild and savage and brimming with animistic spirits routinely interacting with pagan aboriginals. Centuries of Christian indoctrination, along with rudimentary rationalist science have come between the human and the surrounding but greatly shrunken wild places.

But then neither Brontë out in the storm nor Droste’s boy knew of today’s normative anthropocentrism where Nature is so completely contained and explained, ultimately demystified. We today with our logical, desensitised modern minds cannot fully appreciate the eeriness, the out-of-time-and-space transport of someone two hundred years prior.

Let’s take an aside to talk about the very important concept of liminal space. Here’s a quote found on Reddit from the member “Killcode2” explaining what a liminal space is

Imagine a classroom from your childhood. Surely you are imagining it in the day, with sunlight spilling in through the windows and kids shuffling to their desks. This is the state in which a classroom is most frequently seen and serves a purpose for. Now imagine sneaking into your school late at night and everything is empty. It is almost eerie seeing the same classroom at night in a totally different context. Suddenly its usual purpose has been robbed and it is just a room—but not quite. Because now it also feels strangely alien and enigmatic to you, a purposeless, otherworldly architecture. The next day that room would be back to normal, in its default state. It is back to being a real classroom. But that middle phase it was in when you saw it in the night, it’s a liminal phase, a state of transition. And often spaces like that carry eerie characteristics, such as being out of time and out of place. That’s liminal spaces for you. The same could apply for an abandoned mall, an overgrown tree house, or a swimming pool with all the water gone in the winter.

We can imagine Droste’s boy growing up to be a simple, devout Westphalian Roman Catholic Christian who lived out the rest of his life under the lurking fear and dread of that one liminal phase encounter of his otherwise simple and familiar moorland. He probably instilled this fear in his children and grandchildren—just as his head had been filled by the adults around him with legends and stories passed down for generations…

Droste offers us this commoner take on wilds, i.e., a basic civilization-bound human reaction to nature. The Church, having quashed pagan spirituality by ascribing it to Satan, the root of all evil, ensured that what was wild and far enough removed from the church and its Eucharist in the altar tabernacle would be associated with evil and threat. The word heathen (German heidnisch) is derived from heath (Heide)—and there we have a direct link between wilds and pagan, hence evil. And so to venture out on the heath was to venture into (formerly?) heathen-dominated spaces. Again, a peasant of Droste’s era had no such Earth astronaut mindset as we do today. To him the awful spirit world of his distant pagan ancestors was just barely held in check by Jesus and the saints. Where is the devil? Everywhere---especially out on the heath after dark!

Droste underlines a seemingly great limitation of our understanding of nature, of life itself, namely, the vast majority of us are, and probably always will be, grossly susceptible to irrationality. As an aristocrat, she understood that to lead the commoners, to hold the reins, the aristocrat must understand their functional limitations, and subsequently cannot ask them to do what they cannot do, nor go where they cannot go. For all intents and purposes, the moorlands are full of evil after dark, full stop. No attempt at disabusing the commoner of superstitions is really possible. Droste’s is a stasis attitude, one the Powers That Be cannot, should not attempt to improve upon.¹³⁷¹³⁷ Sometimes I can’t help but feel America is just a land of lost peasants who have failed at rising above peasant ignorance and can’t figure out where to go other than into more materialism, i.e., the exercise of peasant hoarding…

We may contrast this with Emily Brontë’s more refined, educated, and definitely Protestant-influenced understanding of her heath. Hers was not the immemorial Catholic peasant mentality, rather, that of an informed Protestant cleared of the eisegesis,¹³⁸¹³⁸ …reading into Biblical scripture what one subjectively wants to believe, as opposed to exegesis, which purportedly is exactly what the original author meant. post-scripture metaphysics supposedly dominating Catholicism. To give an indication of how different Catholics and Protestants are on metaphysical phenomena, consider how thousands of saints are officially recognised by the Catholic church—most having qualified as saintly due to some metaphysical, paranormal religious experience.¹³⁹¹³⁹ The well-known German liqueur Jägermeister features a stag with a glowing crucifix between its antlers, which originated from an apparition seen by Saint Hubertus.


Saintless Protestants, on the other hand, would seem to exclude anything paranormal miraculous not mentioned directly in the Old or New Testament of the Bible. Here’s Günter Grass from his novel The Flounder speaking of a priestess of prehistoric pagan times in his homeland Vistula river delta on the Baltic Sea

Because she was a cook, Mestwina was also a priestess. She raised the cult of Awa to perfection. And when it came time for us all to be baptized, she brewed up paganism and Christianity into a Catholic mixture.

Like the making of sausage, Grass indicates Catholicism has a few “early” ingredients we might not want to see.

To be sure, a Brontë sister at the dawn of Queen Victoria’s reign drank a much more filtered and distilled brew. The night Emily describes is certainly putting on a stormy show, but she is not facing pagan spirits that had never really quit the Westphalian boy’s landscape. For both, Nature surely takes command, but one witness wants out and the other wants in. It might be said Emily is experiencing something like what Mary felt at The Annunciation or Moses with the burning bush. But Emily creates a new sort of metaphysics, namely, sans religiosity, with Dark as its ethos. And so what greater connection can a human have with Nature than to be so completely and deeply transfixed that, for some moments at least, one cannot go, cannot go? And that power? Some Darkness like no one had ever seen or experienced—not the Night School, and certainly not the gothic before.

Emily is not reposing in mosses to behold as did Wordsworth; indeed, this is Nature taking over. With The night is darkening round me Emily Brontë has faced down the fear, the threat, and has become some new citizen of Nature. Hers is a post-pagan Nature worship, some graduation ceremony. And as I must again emphasise, this Nature is Dark, indeed, Dark as a portentous liminal space experience. While Droste closes mystery vis-à-vis nature. Brontë flings it open. And out at us rushes Dark like never before—or since. Liminal space Nature: Tolkien takes us to his nighttime Lothlorien elves, H.P. Lovecraft’s to cosmic demons, but Brontë to a pure, almost metaphysically neutral Dark.

Christianity has held the torch of spirituality ever since it buried Euro-paganism after the fall of the Roman Empire … though it has never figured out what to do with this torch other than march around demanding us to fall in behind. One obvious issue is metaphysics—what is it and how much should there be in lieu of our burgeoning materialism based on science and technology? And as I say, Protestantism cut the metaphysical down even closer to the bone that had Catholicism from animist paganism. And yet Christian piety, reverence, holiness—doesn’t it all just add up to a holding pattern while we go through our increasingly civilized, abstracted extra-nature lives? But as I just described, Nature and Dark became participatory in a new way when the Night darkened round Emily.

In I’ll come when thou art saddest, Haworth Emily is hearing a very punitive, severe, grim God who would seem to arrive only in the human’s most dire moments, when real feeling has entirely unbiased sway. Only when we are saddest, alone, joyless, in the dark, close to our demise does the supreme better come to His lesser for consultation. Only then do the strange sensations roll as precursors to a “sterner” power. Which leaves us to believe all previous times are clouded, ambiguous, dominated by willfulness, if not foolishness. In any event, Haworth Emily plumbs a new depth. A new dimension is opened to life’s precariousness, to the eternal enigma of free will.

Has anyone ever spoken of God in a more consequentially unrelentingly and austere way? Perhaps God is gentle and compassionate—but she does not hide away awful, miserable, grim, desperate as necessary precursors for this particular visitation. Here we have suffering and demise lowering our human folly and waywardness, scrapping our conceits, smashing our will … to open our soul for that flood of strange sensations heralding God. “You’re in a desperate moment. Control of your life has flown. Now we can get down to business,” says God. Emily opens out in these eighty-seven words harrowing implications as to the nature of our relationship with our maker—to be sure, that we are like a dog that has broken his leash and run wild, but now in his hour of need, must as returned to his master.

Surely Haworth Emily had heard preachers thunder from the pulpit of God’s terrible wrath as they quoted various violent passages from the Old Testament. But the God she describes has arrived to calmly discuss His will, to introduce His sterner power towards that end. Doom certainly, but this Brontëan version is graduated from common gothic melodrama. God is not drama of any sort, but the keenest of reality we can know, a death-bed event most consequential. Still, the human is before any sign of redemption and forgiveness, and so threaten him the most complete and utter doom… Let me say, there is little of the “good new” of Jesus in the Brontëan world. Somewhat surprising that.

I come away believing no one sees God quite like she did, no one in or out of scripture has described a more ominous, material meeting of God and man. But then with whom could she have ever spoken about such things? Her cleric father? Doubtful. Too much the Church of England company man.¹⁴⁰¹⁴⁰ I can see the Reverend Patrick coming away from a theological discussion with his braincase daughters theatrically shaking his head, muttering, “Oh, my daughters!” to hearty laughter. Charlotte, Anne? Perhaps. And yet some impasse might have prevented that, antagonisms, codependency ruts, as we might now say. After all, she hid most of her poetry from the world. Here is another insight into her mind, a poem called The Philosopher

I won’t say here is a counter-example, though it belies a very strong willed person—who will make her mental and spiritual breakthrough or fall into despair. She will resolve her three-way cognitive dissonance, or insist on oblivion. What then are these three rivers this self-loathing philosopher speaks of? Presumptuous of me to assume they are Dark, Nature, and Christianity. But I have no doubt her mind was, indeed, wracked by conflicting thoughts, cognitive dissonances, which she could not always bear serenely. Though this willfulness is not that of egotism or pettiness. She berates fate, God, eternity for not giving her at least one moment of the eternal harmony of her three rivers united. Honest petulance.

Repeating,

I would have put more faith, more stock in Jesus, or in salvation while living, or in the tantalising promises of Heaven. But again, she could not mouth the supposed “good news” of Christ. Bliss might be fleetingly known while on Earth, but woe and doom must be endured to the bitter end, as a expurgate of pride, foolishness, and sinfulness, as the fate of a race too weak, too unworthy of even glimpses of heavenly bliss.

Then not Heaven but Earth—as God has so constructed our earthly “starter” experience. I see this seemingly grim surrender, abstaining throughout her poetry, a resolved humility to stay on Earth—even after death.

Reginald Heber’s Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!, surely an entrancing song speaking of bliss and Thee would have died upon Emily’s tongue, as she seemingly eschewed any indulgence of imaginings of heaven and God’s majesty while serving out her earthly sentence

Dutiful Anne would have sung full-throated. Charlotte perhaps less so. But Emily, yes, only mouthed. No coward soul was hers, faith so very strong—but then this Christian triumphalist boosterism, this perfunctory marching behind the Christian torch probably left her in a state both moved but also of stunned ennui.¹⁴¹¹⁴¹ And yet this version might very well have cringed out all three of the Christian minimalist B-sisters…

And so Emily would wish for nothing more than what she had of Nature on Earth, that she too human, too accustomed to Earth, should want anything of any Beyond.

Fast forward several decades—past my well-lit, rationalist life in high-tech professions—to find me in the far northeastern corner of Minnesota, the so-called North Shore of Lake Superior. This is the very last county, Cook, just before the Canadian border, the very tip of the so-called “Arrowhead Region” to the north and east of Duluth. Here are some six million-plus acres of wilderness continuing northward from the coast of the world’s largest body of freshwater (by surface area). To my mind, this can be a very Dark Muse kind of place, so much so that believe I cannot go, cannot go … as much as my fellow humans here might distress me with their pointedly anti-Dark attitudes. Pictures may be worth thousands of words, but our Dark vibe up here must be experienced to be truly appreciated. I routinely get tiny glimpses of the shadow and magic realm whenever I look out at my moonlit Inland Sea¹⁴⁵¹⁴⁵ Really though, calling her Lake Superior is like calling Einstein a high school graduate. over the treetops of dark spruce and gnarled, bare aspen. As Haworth Emily says over and over, Nature is the original Dark.

The Inland Sea or Mother Superior, as some call her, is so much more sea-like than any lake. To my thinking, a lake is much smaller and much—plainer, simpler. The enormity of our Inland Sea means she is often violent like any sea or ocean of saltwater. No friendly little puddle for beer-and-brats picnickers, speedboat and jet ski riffraff is she.¹⁴⁶¹⁴⁶ Wetsuits de rigueur. Even in summer a dunk in her longer than ten minutes can lead to hypothermia … at least on the North Coast. Although the south beaches of Wisconsin and Michigan can be swimmable in the height of summer. However, global climate change may be altering this. Alas. To be sure, one senses a mighty présence on her shores, often dark and moody, if not angry and malevolent on a stormy night. The lady has personality.

Despite our expansive and all but contiguous wildness, despite our famous chains of Ice Age-glaciated lakes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the Arrowhead is not spectacular in the stereotypical “American Great Outdoors” sense. Nothing here overwhelms as with the American West or Alaska with their “natural wonders” postcard vistas every five feet. As I’m saying, a deep moodiness often prevails, setting up the Dark Muse subtle to sublime pathway. Sadly, however, my local community is bereft of Dark Musers.¹⁴⁷¹⁴⁷ …or if they’re here they’re hiding very well. Which might have a silver lining in that I have a perfect laboratory to test whether the Dark Muse is nature or nurture. That is to say, if I see no past-century architecture,¹⁴⁸¹⁴⁸ Our little cemetery looks nothing like the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris, France


if I have no like-minded community to mutually re-enforce nighttime proclivities, then any Dark musing must come from the actual place itself, hence, nature over nurture, right?

But I do believe I am here quite alone with my Dark musings. Despite Grand Marais counting only some thirteen hundred permanent residents, we are becoming evermore modern urban/suburban in behavior and mentality. Why? Mainly due to our popularity as a Northern Midwest resort town. Tourists of short-, medium-, and long-stay duration, well-off retirees, and especially all the relocating urban-suburban refugees constantly mix up and dilute this community. And these newcomers are tipping the balance away from any sort of small-town ambience; instead, they bring and maintain their aloof, disengaged, blinkered, emotionally and intellectually unavailable urban-suburban ways. Of course “boosters,” the knee-jerk positive promoters and spin doctors, will always disagree with my assessment; but many “old-timers” agree that it ain’t what it used to be. Alas.

A particular North Shore social-psychological phenomenon is the large numbers of people who relocate here from the Midwestern urban city-states, e.g., Chicago or especially the Twin Cities, ostensibly to reinvent themselves. Of course tourist destinations traffic in short-exposure vibe and fantasy, but here is a very unique sort of expectancy build-up. My theory has it that our newcomers have made their one great leap out of the sterile, soulless clone-bunny urban/suburban scene with the intent of becoming some better, more authentic version of themselves in the wilderness. The most dominant North Shore reinvention lifestyle is loosely based around a Hemingway and Jack London ethos, i.e., the macho, gonzo, adventurer takes on the Great Outdoors, something I call Neo-Klondikism. Of course the real white European North Shore pioneers of the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth centuries were mainly of Scandinavian origin and brought their admixture of Scandi and Victorian civilization to the wilderness, but of course none of that remains, except at the Historical Society’s museum. Today we see Outside magazine acteurs, college-grad back-to-the-lander nouveau hillbilly peasant chic, with their tattoos, huge beards, Carhartt and Pendelton duds, driving Jeep Cherokees, their theme music a faux country-western Appalachian—in other words, an impromptu guerrilla theatre of some slice of the American Zeitgeist churn.

But then what are we supposed to be doing up here? Thousands upon thousands of tourists spend their vacation time and money here. If I’m getting only vague Dark fumes, I won’t pretend to know what they are getting out of this place.¹⁴⁹¹⁴⁹ …though they do seem to “stay connected”


Many decide to be here permanently, and, thus, begin their North Shore lives of expectation—that their childhood memories and the general vacation magic become 24/7.

Grand Marais is the home of the North House Folk School, where the Arts and Crafts Movement meets the Scandinavian Folk school. Early in the summer they hold their annual Wooden Boat Show where non-powered, legacy wooden boats—many built on-site—are on display, subsequently sailed and oared about our Grand Marais harbour. To be sure, many of these designs are based on the craft used by the Norwegian immigrant fishermen of the late nineteenth, early-twentieth century along our Lake Superior coast. But during this summer’s event all the happy boating was disrupted when a hooligan on a “personal watercraft,” aka jet ski, ripped around the harbour, throwing wake after wake at the participants. I’ve thought about this quite a bit, about how these visiting “educated elites” from the Twin Cities were mocked by the yokel descendent of Scandinavian peasant loggers and fishermen. And so in the twenty-first century we have one derivative hyperreality attacking another. Wikipedia defines hyperreality thusly

Hyperreality is a concept that refers to the process of the evolution of notions of reality, leading to a cultural state of confusion between signs and symbols invented to stand in for reality, and direct perceptions of consensus reality … Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance… Fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum (an insubstantial, unsatisfactory imitation) of reality, rather than any interaction with any “real” reality.

A working definition of hyperreality has often simply been “porn.” And so I wonder what are these idealist, progressive college-gradders hoping to experience with their brief proximity to traditional, human-powered boats? But then what would the hooligan from his world of NASCAR, “contemporary” country music, and cheap American beer hope to achieve with his little protest action? Are we all just lost in these endless opaque labyrinths of recursive symbols, stand-ins, and derivative hyperreality? What is porn and what is real? Yes, indeed, this is the North Shore resort town theatre I experience daily.

Dare I say outright nobody gets this place, or that I do and they don’t? And yet there is a tacit understanding that here is not really dazzling striking amazing. This is a lower-key for sure. Wealthy people are here; but this is certainly not the ostentatious, celebrity scene like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, nor dynastic “old money” like Newport, Rhode Island. No, we’re not in that league.¹⁵⁰¹⁵⁰ The Great Lakes tourist scene has always been a grittier, more working-class world than other tourist Meccas. A memorable advertisement poster for Arrowhead tourism showed a twilit Boundary Waters wilderness lake with the tagline “Stirred not shaken.”¹⁵¹¹⁵¹ A flip of the James Bond martini quip? I’m sure many do have Dark Muse moments, but simply lack the cultural background to process (embellish?) and identify them as such. For example, our so-called Northern Lights give pause, are beloved by all, thus, Night gets a probational capitalisation

Northern Lights photo by North Shore resident Jannice Latz

Here’s a few lines I once wrote some twenty years ago after a late-autumn hike

Mists race westward through the surrounding spruce forest, enveloping the entire ridge. The light is quickly failing, the Western Hemisphere’s greatest inland sea just four miles south and seven hundred feet below fully obscured. Sleet begins to fall stinging my face, keeping my eyes from fully focusing. Though I hear the wind through the coated trees, the distant sound of the invisible waves crashing angrily against the rocks, land’s staunch defenders.

I have come the four miles up from the town, up the wet, slippery trail, up through the darkening forest, to pay homage to this late autumn wonderland. I, modern human, wear a Gore-tex jacket over a Merino wool top over a silk base layer. I wear running tights and padded biking gloves. I wear special minimalist running shoes to simulate barefoot running. So dressed I am out to face the age-old elements.

Not a soul as I climb the darkening trail. I pause at the ridge’s two main streams to take in their loud and clear coursing from all the new precipitation. I should walk rather than run. But visibility is going fast and I must reach the ridge top ere dusk.

Fittingly anti-climatic is my arrival at the cloud-bound ridge top. All but evening’s darkness when I set off again for home. The snow is now accumulating in earnest, making downhill footing difficult. But the Muse is strong, and the growing twilight and pooling blackness make it all the stronger.

Throughout my wonderful hikes in these wild, dark places I greatly appreciate the natural beauty. But always lingering are existential doubts, mainly in the form of my undeniable separation from nature, again, that huge modern gradient between indoors and outdoors. If I said our growing separation from nature runs parallel to our growing separation from one another, I wouldn’t be saying much new. People today are all waddling about in their fantasy silos, extremely sensitive to any challenges of their illusions, their hyperreality stack. I sense we’re in the midst of a great unmooring, and I feel a growing dysphoria. It was darkening round me on that magical Halloween evening, as well as on that misty, sleeting evening. But what can I keep of those experiences when I come back inside?

As so often before and since, I finished my lonely, silent, inclement ridge-top visitation and left Nature to return to my cocooned human existence. So there I sat in my modern apartment drinking my protein shake and wondering what it all meant. Those particular lines were written before I had really latched onto the Dark Muse. Now things are much more firmly formed and I’m following a more intentional path vis-à-vis Dark. And yet clarity, direction, purpose are a fleeting as ever—though what is Dark to me is interwoven with what is Nature to me. Maybe I should just try for more mysticism as did my nineteenth-century principals. Here again is Haworth Emily

And here’s Byron¹⁵²¹⁵² …mad, bad, and dangerous to know Lord Byron from his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

When I’m in Nature I can feel something—even realising I’m a barely tolerated out to despised orphan prodigal juggling hyperrealities. But invariably when I return to civilisation I always feel somewhat crash-landed. I would blame myself even louder if not for the fact that so many, many people can relate to this. Longing, yearning might be all I can ever do amidst infirmities, weakness, corruption … here Haworth Emily

In closing, I doubt Grand Marais will ever be my sepulchre by the sea. I may eventually move on to where the cemeteries are bigger, the buildings older, the people more openly darkly inclined. Or just find, wherever they may be, a niche amongst those who acknowledge there can be a darkness in the day and a lightness arriving at twilight.¹⁵³¹⁵³ …But could the day seem dark to me because the night was fair? asked Haworth Emily. But here is so much of Nature if I will keep after her. And in so chasing Nature, I in my own modern-era way embrace the “dark half” as well, deterioration and Death. Brightness, darkness. The sun shines. The clouds hide the sun. The moon shines. The clouds hide the moon. Light and its play pull at me. The seasons turn eternally emphasizing cycles over clocks—that too. Lost and found and lost again is a basic cycle as well. But at the end of the day my Dark Muse remains mouldering, smoldering, waiting, waiting for something. For now at least I cannot go, I cannot go.