19 No Coward Soul is Mine edited by Charlotte Brontë (1851)
Emily Brontë
“No Coward Soul is Mine” by Emily Brontë was first published posthumously in 1851 by her sister Charlotte Brontë in Selections from the Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell, which is available on Google Books. The poem is in the public domain.
The editorial notes are available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Unless otherwise attributed, they were written by Dr. Kylee-Anne Hingston at the University of Saskatchewan.
No Coward Soul is Mine[1]
The following are the last lines my sister Emily ever wrote.[2]
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.
5
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in thee!
Vain are the thousand creeds
10
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 thine infinity,
15
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
20
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
25
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou—THOU art Being and Breath,
And what THOU art may never be destroyed.
Work Cited
Bell, Ellis [Emily Brontë]. “No Coward Soul is Mine.” Selections from the Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell, edited by Currer Bell [Charlotte Brontë]. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, new revised edition, vol. 2, Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1851, pp. 295–296. Google Books, www.google.ca/books/edition/Wuthering_Heights/825z913V-fIC.
- Published posthumously by her sister Charlotte in 1851 in Selections from the Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell, a section in the Tauchnitz two-volume edition containing Emily’s Wuthering Heights, Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, and what Charlotte called “Posthumous Poems” by both Emily and Anne. ↵
- A note from Charlotte. This declaration, however, is mistaken: researchers have since said that the poem comes from two notebooks by Emily Brontë and was likely written before her novel, Wuthering Heights. ↵
