18 No Coward Soul is Mine (1846)
Emily Brontë
No Coward Soul is Mine[1]
By Emily Brontë
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
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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
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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,
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So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
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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
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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.
Candela Citations
Public domain content
- License: Public Domain: No Known Copyright
- Published posthumously by her sister Charlotte in 1850 in a three-volume edition called Selections from the Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell, which contained Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, and what Charlotte called "Posthumous Poems" by both Emily and Anne. Charlotte Brontë notes in the first published edition, "The following are the last lines my sister Emily ever wrote." 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. ↵
