No Coward Soul Is Mine No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere I see Heaven’s glories shine And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest As I Undying Life, have power in thee Vain are the thousand creeds That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thy infinity So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears Though Earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And thou wert left alone Every Existence would exist in thee There is not room for Death Nor atom that his might could render void Since thou art Being and Breath And what thou art may never be destroyed Emily Jane Brontë, who died in 1848 at the age of thirty, left this poem in a largely unpunctuated manuscript. It was not included, by her own decision, in the first printing of some of her poems in 1846, but it was added posthumously, under the non-authorial title “Last Lines,” to the second edition of 1850, conventionally punctuated and revised by her sister Charlotte. Brontë’s modern editor, Janet Gezari, reproduced Charlotte’s version in 1992 in an appendix to her Emily Brontë: The Complete Poems, but has in the body of her edition removed Charlotte’s additions, printing only the manuscript. I reproduce the manuscript version. Emily Dickinson, a few months before she died in 1886, wishing to forbid a church funeral, left instructions for a home funeral in which she stipulated that a single poem by Emily Brontë, “Last Lines,” should be read aloud by her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Dickinson, reading the lines in 1850, considered them as Brontë’s deathbed manifesto, and adopted them as her own final declaration of creedless faith. A certain Mrs. Jamison, who attended the funeral, recorded the fact that Higginson, prefacing his reading of “Last Lines” and of the scriptural passage that Dickinson had also stipulated to be read aloud (1 Corinthians 15:53, on immortality: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality”), remarked that Emily Dickinson had now put on immortality, but she had really never seemed to have put it off. I became interested in Brontë’s poem when I first read about Dickinson’s funeral: I wanted to understand why, out of the hundreds of poems known to Dickinson, she had chosen this one as a vicarious final utterance of her own. “No coward soul is mine” has been “much commented on,” according to Janet Gezari, but although critics have repeatedly tried to distill it into one creed or another ascribable to Brontë — whose very aim was to escape such fixed categories — no consensus has been attained. “No coward soul is mine” is in part vividly definite, but it is also sufficiently abstract to defy common conventions of Christian lyric such as the inclusion of elements of Jesus’ life and sayings, allusions to church feasts and rituals, and credal affirmation of an afterlife. The most vigorous lines of Brontë’s poem are those insisting on the entirely interior nature of human faith: “Vain are the creeds of men, unutterably vain.” Brontë’s “vain” is alluding not to vainglory but to the opening verse of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” The Hebrew word translated into English as “vanity” is hevel, and hevel (the commentaries tell us) is one of the several Hebrew words for “air,” or “wind,” but is most often used negatively to mean “fleeting,” “transitory,” “futile.” Brontë is speaking as a deeply literate nineteenth-century reader, well aware (from the pre-Darwinian geological proof of evolution) of the successive and transitory creeds of all religions historically recorded. For Brontë, Christianity — the only “creed” that she knows well — must stand in for all other creeds and their myths of a divinity both creative and inspiring; and Brontë must invent her own version of the sublime phenomenon of unbidden human inspiration. She does it most conspicuously in this poem. It must be remembered that Brontë was the daughter of a learned priest of the English church, an Oxford graduate in classics, himself a poet, whose children were raised as Christian believers, and who all (except Emily) taught in his Sunday school. Brontë’s poetic duty in denying the truth of “creeds” is to strip the Christian God of every sustainable predicate. Theologians had asserted at least since Aquinas, following Maimonides, that no positive qualities could be predicated of God, owing to the limitations of language: He (always male) could be characterized only negatively, as one who was not subject to death, not affected by time, not vulnerable to suffering. This affirmation became known as apophatic theology. God was im-mortal, e-ternal, im-passible. Brontë’s own “Deity” is an internal one, replacing the external and mythological God of the creeds and taking on an ever-present existence within herself, to be interpreted only by herself. The relation between self and deity, as Brontë formulates it, is a perfect and cunningly phrased closed circuit of reciprocity. Addressing her Deity as a lower-case “thou” to her “I,” Brontë poises their relation as one of mutually acknowledged parallel acts of repose and empowerment as she addresses her deity: “Life that in me hast rest, /as I, Undying Life have power in thee.” Her Deity, a capitalized “Undying Life,” accepts a physical repose within herself as she exists in its Life, receiving power as she participates in its immortal “Undying” metaphysical existence. This deity is neither anthropomorphized nor given gender; it displays no external acts such as Adamic creation and is embodied in no human figure
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