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"Cold in the Earth" Emily Bronte - A* IGCSE REVISION NOTES
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English Literature
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CIE
These revision notes are A* IGCSE Level, providing rich critical analysis of the poem. These explore the poem in great detail, noting insightful points for different aspects of the poem, namely the language, structure/ form and voice/ tone. These notes cover the whole poem in immense depth and are ...
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English Literature
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NOTES: ‘Cold in The Earth’ by Emily Bronte
LANGUAGE:
‘have melted into spring’ ‘Cold in The Earth’ ‘deep snow’ ‘Cold in the
dreary grave!’ ‘wild’ -> Immediately we see how Bronte uses pathetic
fallacy to depict the numbness the speaker feels which relates to
‘Wuthering Heights’ with its use of cold nature to describe the
character’s feelings: her heart has turned to stone just as her husband
has in the ground, she feels her humanity has been put on pause and has
frozen inside her. This poem is peppered with sombre words – ‘cold’
‘dreary’ – to constantly remind us of how depressing the world in
Victorian time becomes when one was a widow; or, to show everything
has gone cold without him lighting and heating it up for her like the sun.
Moreover, the ‘deep snow’ functions not only to explain how her
husband’s body is covered but to explain how her aging memories of
him are muffled by time. These contrasting words can serve to reflect
her internal battle: should she die or try to live without him? But when it
has ‘melted’ this continues the idea nature reflecting her - seeing as it
has claimed her husband she may perhaps feel connected to him
through nature and more linked to nature as it keeps a part of her -, so
she may be inferring that she seems to thaw a bit and starts to live again
slowly but steadily. She still misses him, not moving on but recovering.
Then there comes a sharp contrast with the adjective ‘wild’ describing
the fifteen years have gone past being perhaps a rollercoaster of
emotions, juggling sentiments of grief, loneliness and insanity.
‘dreams’ ‘Despair’ ‘destroy’ ‘joy’ ‘memories rapturous pain’ ‘divinest
anguish’ -> The poem is jam-packed with confused feelings, maybe to
show she indeed does have options in her life on how to deal with her
‘despair’. These words stick out and contrast with the rhyme: to
‘destroy’ the rest of her life and give in or to find ‘joy’, these are her
clashing attitudes where some days – maybe depicted as stanzas - she
feels like she cannot live and on others she is hopeful. She handles the
oncoming waves of life grappling with emotions ridden by grief but with
different ways of handling it: surfing or drowning. The last stanza wraps
up the moral of the poem: better to have loved and lost than to never
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