Wuthering Heights

Deeply atmospheric, this unrhymed lyric poem consists of five nine-line stanzas. Its first-person speaker is usually identified with the poet herself, as the poem is based on Plath’s experiences in Yorkshire. However, the poem itself does not give many clues about the speaker’s identity, conveying instead a sense of feeling overwhelmed by the landscape. The poet uses each stanza to examine one particular element of the landscape, starting with the horizon at sunset. Despite the speaker feeling stultified by the elements, they continue to move through nature. This shows that despite the hopelessness the speaker experiences, they refuse to remain static. Their forward movement is mirrored by the progression of the day in the poem. By the poem’s end, sunset has turned to night.

In the first stanza, the speaker uses the odd comparison of kindling to describe the line of the horizon. In literature and art, the horizon usually signifies openness, but here the bunches of sticks seem to “ring” (Line 1) or encircle the speaker. The implication is the horizon crowds or confines them. Further, the otherwise neat, picturesque line of the horizon appears transformed into untidy, unstable bundles, “tilted and disparate” (Line 2). “Disparate” echoes desperation and despair and shows the speaker’s heightened mood of sadness. The speaker tries to find hope in the moment of sunset, describing it with the metaphor of the kindled sticks. “Touched by a match” (Line 3), the horizon may catch fire and warm them, but the effect of the sunset is anticlimactic. The speaker had hoped the sunset would be “weighting the pale sky with a soldier color” (Line 7), the soldier color being red, which typically follows a sunset. Yet even this positive expectation is tinged with ambiguity, since the word “weighting” (Line 7) conveys the sense of heaviness in both the landscape and the speaker’s interior mindscape.

The horizons “dissolve and dissolve” (Line 8) after the sunset, like “a series of promises” (Line 8). The repetition of dissolve, followed by the idea of a succession of promises, conveys a sense of monotony as well as impermanence. Yet the speaker steps forward, the motion showing their determination to resist both the landscape and their state of despair. As the speaker steps into the wild moors, they are immediately accosted by the opposing wind. The wind here symbolizes the forces set against the speaker. These could be social pressures or a state of sadness. If biographical context is considered, the pressure could also come from the American poet’s feeling of alienation in England, which is well documented. The comparison of the wind to destiny emphasizes the speaker’s feeling of hopelessness, since they cannot control something fated. There is a literary allusion here as well: In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the titular king, feeling betrayed by his daughters, rages against a storm on the heath or moors. The speaker, doubled over against the wind, makes the strange statement that the heather—the wild shrubs covering the moors—might invite the speaker to lie dead among their roots. The statement conveys two things: the speaker’s fear they may trip and injure themselves in the hostile landscape, and a desire to be obliterated. Rather than fight the wind, the speaker would want to give into the hypnotic beauty of the heather and just sink into the ground. Despite this altered mental state, the speaker again moves forward.

In the third stanza, the sheep, like the wind in the previous lines, is the symbol of hostile nature for the speaker. Unlike the speaker, the sheep know their place in this landscape, implying that they fit into society. This shows the speaker’s feeling of alienation. The metaphor comparing the sheep to grandmothers is an instance of dark comedy. The image is absurd and funny, which shows the speaker can still see humor in their predicament. Juxtaposed with the comic image are notes of foreboding: the “grandmotherliness” of the sheep is a “disguise” (Line 25) akin to the one worn by the wolf in the story of Red Riding Hood. The sheep study the speaker without empathy; the speaker feels silly and inconsequential before the sheep, as if the speaker doesn’t matter. Being mailed into space is another metaphor for the desire for (and fear of) obliteration. The sheep’s “yellow teeth” (Line 26) may be a dated, tongue-in-cheek joke about English people having “bad” teeth. The sheep then could also represent people by whom the speaker feels judged.

The fourth element to which the speaker is drawn are the wheel ruts, the path worn down by wheels over decades and even centuries. The reference to the ruts—a real feature in the moors—immediately evokes the idea of history and ruins. Strikingly, while the signs of other people abound, the speaker is the only human in the landscape. The water flowing in the gulley is described as “limpid” (Line 29), a descriptor linked with purity, beauty, and transparency. The descriptor shows the speaker registers the beauty of the landscape, is possibly awed by it, but in their mood of despair interprets the awe as terror. Thus, the limpid waters are clear as “solitudes” (Line 30), suggesting a sense of emptiness. Even the brief relief-giving idea of solitude slips through the speaker’s fingers, again adding to the poem’s theme of impermanence. The plural “solitudes” (Line 30) echoes “horizons” (Line 1), suggesting the speaker feels crowded and overwhelmed by a multitude of forces.

The speaker moves on to other symbols of human habitation, such as the ruined and abandoned houses on the moors, which are often reduced to door frames. It is unclear whether these houses are real, or if the landscape suggests ruins to the speaker. These houses terrify the speaker, as they have “unhinged” (Line 32) themselves of humans, assuming another life like ghosts. The use of “unhinged” here is deliberate, since it also refers to an altered mental state. Continuing the theme of ghosts, the air sounds like it is echoing an ominous phrase: “black stone” (Line 36); “black stone” (Line 36) is evocative of tomb stones. The surreal imagery here also contains literary references. Wuthering Heights, the Emily Brontë novel, to which the poem obliquely refers (though its subject is not the novel but its landscape), contains many Gothic elements like strange voices and apparitions. Here too, the air speaks in voices. Thus, the poet imbues the landscape with Gothic imagery.

The final stanza returns to the image of the speaker feeling weighted by the present. The speaker is “the one upright / among all horizontals” (Lines 37-38), the one crumbling pillar shouldering the mass of the sky. This image highlights the speaker’s sense of isolation—again, the speaker is the only human, the only vertical—in a flattened landscape. It is also a reference to the speaker’s desperate effort to hold their world upright despite crumbling from within. The desire for annihilation returns in the next image, that of the grass tossed by the wind, as if beating its head. The grass may be a symbol for the speaker, since it is “too delicate / for a life in such a company” (Lines 40-41). Like the grass, the speaker too is in motion, but the motion is intended to wear them out, since the speaker is too fragile to exist among antagonistic forces. The phrase “darkness terrifies it” (Line 42) is an example of pathetic fallacy, which is giving inanimate things or animals human characteristics. The speaker projects their own emotions on the grass; the dark is a metaphor for uncertainty and despair.

At this moment of uncertainty, however, the speaker’s courage rises again, in the form of the lights coming on in houses in the valleys around the moors. The gleaming light is a symbol of hope. Again, like the soldier color in Stanza 1, images of hope contain shades of ambiguity. The valleys are described as “narrow and black as purses” (Lines 43-44), a simile that suggests a sense of confinement. Even the valleys are steep and closed; the lights from houses should bring small comfort, gleaming like “small change” (Line 45), but the phrase also suggests something meagre and parsimonious. This mixed image of hope and doubt mirrors the speaker’s mindscape.