There are writers who thrive on gloom. Dreariness inspires them far more than happiness ever could. Emily Jane Bronte belongs to this melancholy gathering. Impossible to imagine her – or any of her siblings, Charlotte, Anne, and the hapless Branwell – cavorting in a pool at Club Med or footing a fox-trot at the Rainbow Room.

For Emily, it was always “a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” as Melville’s Ishmael, another feaster on spleen, put it. To such temperaments, gaiety seems suspect, mere happiness insipid; they prefer the bleakest moors shrouded in mist to vapid sunlight or frivolous waves. Even so, their poems often produce a strange, electric exhilaration in the reader, perhaps because they sing in what Auden called “a rapture of distress.”

Though much anthologized, Emily Bronte’s poems aren’t as well known as “Wuthering Heights,” and yet she is a poet of the most piercing intensity. And like her one novel, her poetry displays spooky, almost pathological strains. She revels in sorrow and savors her anguish so smackingly that grief itself becomes delicious. In “Fall Leaves Fall,” one of her most beautiful lyrics, she wrote:

Fall leaves fall die flowers away
Lengthen night and shorten day
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day

These gnomic lines move so suavely – she abolishes all punctuation that would retard the flow – that we don’t at first hear what she’s saying, only how well she sings. I don’t like the abbreviated days of late November that dwindle down to the winter solstice, and December 21, that murky shred of a day, is my least favorite in the entire calendar. Emily Bronte, with sublime perversity, not only loves the dilution of daylight, she longs for it with all the passion of her soul. And yet, as the final leaves spiral down, I too find each one “speaking bliss to me” as it flutters; and I have to admit that there’s something powerfully seductive – which she catches with exactitude – in the long entombment of winter, and worse than winter, that’s to come.

The textual history of Emily Bronte’s poetry is vexed. During her lifetime she and her two sisters gathered their poems together and self-published a volume entitled “Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell” in May 1846, with Emily sheltering under the alias of “Ellis.” It isn’t always clear which sister wrote what, and to make matters worse, Charlotte revised some of Emily’s poems after she died. The best edition of her poems, which admirably clarifies the texts, is “The Complete Poems” (Penguin Classics, 293 pages, $12.95) edited by Janet Gezari, who also provides a lucid introduction and helpful notes.

Emily Bronte was scarcely 30 when she died in 1848 (Anne followed a year later, and Charlotte in 1855), and it’s not surprising that her poems don’t always attain a brilliant pitch. Grief, like anything else, can turn monotonous, and the insistence of the minor key too often palls in her lyrical work. But at her best she achieves a cold finality that can be thrilling, as in this little quatrain (again unpunctuated):

It will not shine again
Its sad course is done
I have seen the last ray wane
Of the cold bright sun

This seems to me to be a tiny masterpiece. It is short, but a whole lifetime of sorrow is compressed within it. And how is it put together? Two simple statements succeeded by one longer sentence that spreads over two lines. The effect is to make the last line seem to furl out at more than its actual length. And notice how the relentless succession of one-syllable words gives the only two-syllable word – “again” – a force out of all proportion to its ordinariness. The tone is chill and somber, but the concluding motion of the verse lends a sudden exuberance to the poem; mere sadness passes into an ecstasy of regret. There’s a strange comfort in so inconsolable an utterance.

Many of Emily Bronte’s poems were fragments of an epic history of an imaginary realm which she and Anne called “Gondal.” They described it as “a large island in the North Pacific”; it had its own emperors and customs, laws and sagas. The capital was Regina, and there was a sister realm named Gaaldine, “newly discovered in the South Pacific,” riddled with caverns. The sisters coined weird names for its denizens, such as Brenzaida, or its regions, such as Lake Elderno, or names, such as Elbe or Ierne, that echoed the diaeresis of their own surname. Out of this private topography ballads, songs, and bits of heroic narrative were drafted. There are even premonitions of Heathcliff in some of the moodier stanzas. Though not all her poems are “Gondal poems,” the awareness of this submerged, and secret, kingdom just beneath the surface of many of them gives them a little mysterious spin, as though they were articulate ruins of some extinguished empire.

A few years later and an ocean away, Emily Dickinson, in her own secret kingdom of Amherst, would write “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?” I don’t know if our Emily read the English Emily’s poems – I suspect she did – but they were, despite obvious differences of style, shadow-sisters. “No coward soul is mine,” Emily Bronte wrote, and the same is true of Dickinson. Both stared pain in the face without flinching. “I like a look of agony, / Because I know it’s true,” wrote Emily Dickinson in a line Emily Bronte would have endorsed. Both possessed a genius quickened by grief.

eormsby@nysun.com