balmy sleep

Anne Brontë, aged about 13 (drawing by a 17-year-old Charlotte in 1833)

[Image source: http://kleurrijkbrontesisters.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/anne-bronte-william-weightman.html]




More info on portraits of Anne: http://www.mick-armitage.staff.shef.ac.uk/anne/ann5face.html . There are none of her as an adult.






No hope, no pleasure can I find;
I am grown weary of my mind;
Often in balmy sleep I try
To gain a rest from misery,


And in one hour of calm repose
To find a respite from my woes;
But dreamless sleep is not for me
And I am still in misery.


(from Anne Brontë, "A Voice from the Dungeon")


The Gondal speaker is a certain Marina Sabia, otherwise unknown.


This exemplifies what makes us warm to Anne, an eighteenth-century (say, Cowperian) firmness of diction, a penetrating insight, a bold straightforwardness of statement,  and all this completely without ego (unlike both her sisters).


The repeat of the word "misery" at the end of successive stanzas, but varied by being made to rhyme with different vowel-sounds, actually recalls to me a mid-sixteenth-century music, maybe Wyatt.


I tried to look up the rhetorical device that Anne uses when she says "balmy sleep", but I failed to find it.  "Balmy" applies to sleep as it ought to be - as it is in books - but clearly not as it's experienced by Marina, whose dreams are terrible, turmoiled things. Even the happy dream of her child and her child's father goes wrong, in the space of a single stanza:


I thought he smiled and spoke to me,
But still in silent ecstasy
I gazed at him, I could not speak;
I uttered one long piercing shriek. ...