The Full Text of “Shall earth no more inspire thee”
1Shall earth no more inspire thee,
2Thou lonely dreamer now?
3Since passion may not fire thee
4Shall Nature cease to bow?
5Thy mind is ever moving
6In regions dark to thee;
7Recall its useless roving—
8Come back and dwell with me.
9I know my mountain breezes
10Enchant and soothe thee still—
11I know my sunshine pleases
12Despite thy wayward will.
13When day with evening blending
14Sinks from the summer sky,
15I’ve seen thy spirit bending
16In fond idolatry.
17I’ve watched thee every hour;
18I know my mighty sway,
19I know my magic power
20To drive thy griefs away.
21Few hearts to mortals given
22On earth so wildly pine;
23Yet none would ask a heaven
24More like this earth than thine.
25Then let my winds caress thee;
26Thy comrade let me be—
27Since nought beside can bless thee,
28Return and dwell with me.
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“Shall earth no more inspire thee” Introduction
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"Shall earth no more inspire thee" is Emily Brontë's strange tale of the power of nature. In this poem, the earth itself reaches out to a "lonely dreamer": a person who has in the past found deep delight in nature, but has since withdrawn into a melancholy solitude. Only nature, the earth tells this dreamer, can heal them; they'll only get lost if they look for answers in their own inner world. Nature, in this poem, is more than just a beautiful place. It's a godlike person, eager to share an intense relationship with those who open themselves to its powers. The poem first appeared in the 1846 collection Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, a collaborative (and pseudonymous) book of poetry that Emily ("Ellis") Brontë published with her sisters Charlotte ("Currer") and Anne ("Acton").
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“Shall earth no more inspire thee” Summary
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Oh, you lonely dreamer: can the earth no longer inspire you? If passionate feeling can't move you, must nature also stop serving you?
Your mind is lost in realms you don't understand. Call it back from its useless wanderings and come live with me.
I know that you still feel captivated and calmed by the breezes that blow down from my mountains. I know that my sunshine still makes you happy, in spite of your headstrong foolishness.
When the sun slowly sets in summer and the light blends with the darkness, I've seen your very soul bowing, worshipping an idol.
I've watched you all the time, and I know the power I have over you. I know I have the magical ability to drive away your sorrows.
Few living people have hearts that long for what they can't have as intensely as yours does. But then, no one but you, if they were asked what kind of heaven they longed for, would ask for something so exactly like nature as it is.
So let my breezes stroke you; let me be your companion. Since nothing else in the world can give you the blessings I can, come back and live with me.
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“Shall earth no more inspire thee” Themes
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The Power of Nature
In “Shall earth no more inspire thee,” a speaker tries to tempt a sorrowful “lonely dreamer” who’s been pining away indoors back out into nature, telling them that only the earth can “inspire” and “bless” them. This speaker is, in fact, the earth itself: nature is calling out to the addressee here, coaxing them to come and feel its healing “caress.” The earth’s self-portrait in this poem suggests that nature is a mighty source of comfort and beauty—but more than that, a godlike force, a being with whom one can have a relationship.
The earth tells its sorrowful dreamer that they’ll never find answers to their problems in the “useless roving” (or aimless wandering) of their mind. The only reliable source of “inspir[ation],” healing, and pleasure in the world is, well, the world: the “enchant[ment]” of the “mountain breezes,” the delicious touch of the “sunshine.” Absorbing the beauty of nature, the earth says, has uplifted the spirit of its addressee countless times before, and it’ll work again.
The earth feels especially certain of that in this dreamer's case. It claims to have “watched [them] every hour” and to “know” that it alone has the “magic power / to drive [their] griefs away.” Indeed, the earth knows this loved person so intimately that it’s aware how much they love the earth back, and more deeply than most. No one else in the world, the earth tells the “lonely dreamer,” would “ask a heaven / More like this earth” than they would: the addressee, in other words, sees nature as just about as close to heaven as you can get. The intense intimacy with which the earth speaks to its addressee suggests that the natural world isn’t merely a source of healing and delight, but an active, living force that responds to, watches over, and loves those who engage deeply with it.
This poem might even suggest that the earth’s power is unique in this way. “Nought beside [the earth] can bless thee,” the earth tells the dreamer: nothing else in the world can offer the kind of solace, joy, and connection that nature can.
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Melancholy, Isolation, and Withdrawal
“Shall earth no more inspire thee” paints an indirect portrait of a person whose sadness has made them withdraw from the surrounding world. The earth—the speaker of this poem—reaches out to this unfortunate soul, coaxing them to leave behind their sorrow and come back out under the sun, where nature can restore them. But the very fact that the earth has to make this urgent plea suggests that certain kinds of melancholy can lure a person deeply inside themselves, shutting them away from the outside world.
The earth calls the person they’re addressing a “lonely dreamer,” perhaps suggesting that their dreams, thoughts, and imaginings have carried them away into solitude. In fact, the earth even imagines this person’s “mind” exploring “regions dark to thee”: a metaphor that suggests their internal landscape is incomprehensible and hard to navigate, like a wasteland through which they’re “useless[ly] roving.” Lost in thought, this poor dreamer is not getting anywhere helpful.
The poor dreamer’s “roving[s]” lack not just understanding and direction, but “passion” (or strong feeling). In this state of sorrow, the earth observes, “passion cannot fire thee”: the addressee doesn’t (and indeed can’t) feel touched by anything they’re thinking about. Though they “wildly pine” (or long intensely) for what they’re missing, nothing can reach them. (That image of pining might give a hint as to what made the addressee so sad in the first place: perhaps they’ve lost something or someone.)
The earth’s fervent address to this lost soul suggests that turning from the inside world to the outside world might be the only possible help for a sorrow so deep. But the poem’s description of the addressee’s predicament hints that this might be easier said than done. The inner world has a landscape, too, and it’s one that it’s easy to get lost in.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Shall earth no more inspire thee”
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Lines 1-8
Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee
Shall Nature cease to bow?
Thy mind is ever moving
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving—
Come back and dwell with me.A mysterious voice speaks out at the beginning of “Shall earth no more inspire thee," addressing a “lonely dreamer.” In a pair of coaxing rhetorical questions, the speaker asks the dreamer, in essence: Why should you believe that nature can no longer move you?
The phrasing of these questions paints an indirect picture of this sad dreamer. Clearly, this person was once deeply moved by strong feeling and by the glories of the earth. The speaker’s questions hearken back to a time when earth did "inspire" the addressee, when it did “bow” to their needs. But in their “lonel[iness]” and “dream[iness],” this dreamer seems to have gotten cut off from the world of people as well as from nature. They’re lost, perhaps, in their own inner world. And “passion,” the speaker observes, can no longer “fire” them: in other words, strong feeling can’t excite them. (“Passion” meant something closer to “intense emotion” than “romantic feelings” at the time this poem was written.) This listener seem trapped in a strange melancholy, cut off from everything that might once have been able to touch them. They’ve withdrawn to their own inner world.
The speaker makes that idea tangible by imagining the dreamer lost in their internal landscape: “thy mind,” the speaker tells the dreamer, is “ever moving / In regions dark to thee.” In other words, the dreamer might as well be stumbling through a dark wasteland, for all the good their “useless roving” through their own thoughts is doing them. Their inner world is dark and empty; the outer world, the speaker suggests, is just the opposite.
Everything in these first two stanzas, then, adds up to a plea for this introverted dreamer to stop dreaming and turn to nature again—and, in turning to nature, to return to the speaker, to “come back and dwell with [them].” Readers might thus imagine this speaker as some kind of roamer, someone who lives out under the sky and wants the “lonely dreamer” to join them there, in a place where they can relish the joys of nature together. But as the rest of the poem will reveal, this speaker’s identity is far stranger than that.
This speaker will make their plea to their wandering dreamer in short, forceful quatrains (four-line stanzas) of iambic trimeter. That means that each line uses three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “Come back | and dwell | with me.”
There’s a twist in this meter, though: all the odd-numbered lines feel just a little bit longer. That’s because they are! They reliably use what’s known as a feminine ending, an extra unstressed syllable at the end of the line, like the “thee” in “Shall earth | no more | inspire thee.”
The poem thus ends up feeling like a more urgent, breathless version of a ballad (a form in which stanzas alternate between lines of iambic tetrameter—four iambs—and iambic trimeter). While the extra unstressed syllables make the lines seem to sway, those three thumping beats just keep landing, regular as a pounding heart and even as purposeful footsteps. All the energy the speaker wants for the dreamer is alive in the poem’s sounds.
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Lines 9-12
I know my mountain breezes
Enchant and soothe thee still—
I know my sunshine pleases
Despite thy wayward will.
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Lines 13-16
When day with evening blending
Sinks from the summer sky,
I’ve seen thy spirit bending
In fond idolatry. -
Lines 17-20
I’ve watched thee every hour;
I know my mighty sway,
I know my magic power
To drive thy griefs away. -
Lines 21-24
Few hearts to mortals given
On earth so wildly pine;
Yet none would ask a heaven
More like this earth than thine. -
Lines 25-28
Then let my winds caress thee;
Thy comrade let me be—
Since nought beside can bless thee,
Return and dwell with me.
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“Shall earth no more inspire thee” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
This poem features a striking personification of the earth. In its first couple of stanzas, “Shall earth no more inspire thee” feels like a plea from a friend or a lover to an unhappy beloved, encouraging them to return to nature and to them. In the third stanza, abruptly and surprisingly, the speaker reveals that they are nature: it’s the earth itself who is speaking, coaxing its loved one to come back to it.
The earth’s voice feels strong and assured, even imperious or godlike. Repeatedly, it tells its loved one that it “know[s]” the power it has to console and “inspire” them, and that it’s “watched [them] every hour” like a guardian angel. The earth’s calm certainty that it has the ability to heal and refresh its loved one captures the poem’s attitude toward nature: nature, here, is a mighty, omnipresent force, and one that it’s possible to have a relationship with.
This device tells readers something about the poem’s addressee, not just its speaker. The person who hears (or imagines) the earth speaking to them in this way must truly have a deep spiritual connection with the natural world. The earth seems right in saying that few people in the world have a vision of heaven that’s “more like this earth” that the addressee’s.
There may be darker implications in this personification, too. While much of the earth’s rhetoric invites the addressee to come and enjoy its pleasures—“mountain breezes,” “sunshine”—the invitation to “return and dwell with me” might also point toward a more complete and literal union with earth: death and burial.
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Rhetorical Question
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Anaphora
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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“Shall earth no more inspire thee” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Thee, thou, thy, thine
- Fire
- Bow
- Dark
- Roving
- Dwell
- Wayward will
- Fond idolatry
- Sway
- Pine
- Nought beside
Thee, thou, thy, thine-
These are old-fashioned ways of saying "you" and "yours":
- "Thee" is the object form of "you," as in "I miss thee."
- "Thou" is the subject form of "you," as in "Thou art spending too much time inside these days."
- "Thy" and "thine" simply mean "yours." ("Thine" appears more often before words that start with a vowel—in the same way you'd use "an" in place of "a.")
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Shall earth no more inspire thee”
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Form
“Shall earth no more inspire thee” uses an urgent, simple form that suits its passionate speaker: the earth itself. The poem’s seven quatrains (four-line stanzas) are all written in iambic trimeter. That means each stanza uses four lines of three iambs (metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm) apiece, as in “Thy com- | rade let | me be.” (Readers might notice, however, that the odd-numbered lines sound a little longer than the even-numbered lines. That’s because they use what’s known as a feminine ending, an extra unstressed syllable at the end of the line.) The stanzas also follow an ABAB rhyme scheme.
This simple form echoes that of a ballad, and nothing feels fussy or elegant in this poem's shape; the rhymes and rhythms move like firm, even footsteps or a pulsing heartbeat. That energy perfectly matches what the earth is calling its wandering beloved to do: get back on their feet, get their blood pumping, and get back into nature.
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Meter
“Shall earth no more inspire thee” is written in iambic trimeter: lines of three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in line 8: “Come back | and dwell | with me.” There’s some variation throughout the poem, however. While the poem’s lines all use three iambs apiece, they also manage to change length:
- The odd-numbered lines consistently use what’s known as a feminine ending: an extra unstressed syllable at the end of the line, like the “thee” at the end of “Shall earth | no more | inspire thee.”
- The even lines use straight-ahead iambic trimeter, as in “De spite | thy way- | ward will.”
This variation gives the poem a little sway, rocking the otherwise steady lines back and forth ever so slightly. At the same time, there’s near total metrical consistency here: only in line 14, “Sinks from | the sum- | mer sky,” does Brontë introduce a single variation for spice, starting the line with a trochee (the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm). The poem’s rhythm thus feels both firm-footed and hypnotically swaying. It’s as if the steady earth is trying to cast a spell over its “comrade,” coaxing them back into its embrace.
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Rhyme Scheme
A simple, singsong rhyme scheme contributes to the poem's steady momentum. The rhymes in each stanza run as follows:
ABAB
The first and third lines of each stanza rhyme with each other, as do the second and fourth. This alternating pattern works with the striding meter to suggest footsteps or heartbeats, making the poem sound firm, lively, and energetic. (Here and there, some slant rhyme adds subtle texture to the poem's sounds: for instance, in the partial match between "moving" and "roving" in lines 5 and 7, or between "given" and "heaven" in lines 21 and 23.) Such a reliable pattern also helps to give the earth's voice a tone of conviction. Coaxing its "lonely dreamer" to come back to its embrace, the earth speaks of all it "know[s]" of them with assurance: it firmly believes that the dreamer should return to nature, as surely as A rhyme returns to A rhyme and B rhyme to B rhyme.
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“Shall earth no more inspire thee” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is the earth itself. Reaching out to a "lonely dreamer" whose love for nature has gotten swallowed up in melancholy, the earth speaks boldly of its own power to heal and restore them. It assures the poor soul it's speaking to that it has "watched [them] every hour," that it knows them more intimately than anyone else ever could, and it's sure it holds a special "magic power" to relieve their "griefs." Here, the earth sounds somewhat like a god or a spirit, a loving and omniscient watcher who wants nothing more than to care for its unhappy beloved.
However, the earth's passionate plea to its wandering "dreamer" might also be read with an edge of anxiety. For all that the earth is a godlike character here, it also seems to "wildly pine" for its addressee to return to its loving "caress," just as the addressee "pine[s]" for—well, the poem never quite says what they're pining for, deepening a note of tormented romance. If it weren't for the earth's confident praise of its own "mountain breezes" and "sunshine," this poem would simply feel like a love song, a desperate attempt to win back a wandering beloved.
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“Shall earth no more inspire thee” Setting
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Unusually, the speaker and the setting are one and the same in this poem: they’re both the earth. The whole natural world calls out to the poem's addressee, inviting them to embrace its many pleasures: the beauty of summer sunsets, the glory of mountains, the gentle warmth of sunlight.
Readers familiar with Emily Brontë might have a suspicion that the particular stretch of earth in question here is Brontë's native Yorkshire, a wild, windswept, and hilly landscape whose “mountain breezes” and “sunshine” moved her deeply (and haunted her during the few, brief periods she left her family home in the little hamlet of Haworth). For that matter, readers might see a bit of the passionate Brontë in the addressee, too: the "lonely dreamer" the earth reaches out to here seems to experience nature's power (and life in general) more intensely than most.
But the poem also offers a more general sense of the natural world as a place of grandeur and pleasure. Singing its own praises, the earth speaks of its “magic power” to drive away the "griefs" of those who love it. Earth's beauty might even inspire "idolatry," an almost religious fervor. Nature becomes both a church and a god, here, offering consolation, inspiration, and love to the souls who go out to meet it.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Shall earth no more inspire thee”
Literary Context
The English writer Emily Brontë (1818-1848) published "Shall earth no more inspire thee" in the 1846 Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, a volume that also collected work by her sisters Charlotte and Anne (all writing under pseudonyms). Born and raised in a remote corner of Yorkshire, these three siblings would become some of the greatest and most important writers of the 19th century.
Emily Brontë is most famous for her groundbreaking novel Wuthering Heights, whose stylistic innovations and wild, grotesque characters made an immediate impression on the literary world. (This book still influences artists to this day.) But she made her first appearance in print as a poet. After her elder sister Charlotte discovered a collection of poetry that Emily had been working on in private, she persuaded Emily (with serious difficulty—Emily was both stubborn and secretive) to contribute to a family collection of verse.
Charlotte would later explain:
Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’—we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice [...]
Despite this all-too-prudent disguise, the original edition of the Poems only sold two copies. The few critical notices the book received, however, were particularly impressed with the poems by "Ellis"—a.k.a. Emily. These would be the only poems she published before her untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 30 (although nearly 200 more poems would be discovered later).
Intensely emotive, preoccupied with love, nature, the imagination, and death, Emily Brontë's work carried on the traditions of the earlier Romantic poets (such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and Gothic novelists. Her work's distinctive independence and wildness, however, was something altogether new.
Historical Context
In many ways, Emily Brontë would live in a private otherworld her whole life. On those few occasions she traveled away from home (to attend school alongside Charlotte, for instance), she hated it. She was always most at ease in the seclusion of her native Yorkshire, roaming the moors with her beloved dog Keeper. The daughter of a minister, Brontë developed her own nonconformist and individual relationship to God: like the "lonely dreamer" of this poem, she found comfort, inspiration, and divinity in nature.
Often remembered as the prickliest and strangest of the Brontë siblings, Emily was a figure not formed to fit neatly into Victorian society's narrow ideals of middle-class womanhood (which demanded a sweet temper, obedience, and a career only as a wife—or a governess in a pinch). As her teacher Constantin Héger said of her:
She should have been a man—a great navigator [...] her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty [...] She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman [...] impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.
For Emily Brontë as for many writers of the 19th century, authorship offered scope for energies (and a "wayward will") the wider world just couldn't accept in a woman.
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More “Shall earth no more inspire thee” Resources
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External Resources
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The Brontë Museum — Visit the website of the Brontë Parsonage Museum to learn more about Emily Brontë and her family.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Brontë's short (and rather mysterious) life via the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poem Set to Music — Listen to excerpts of a song cycle inspired by this poem (and others of Brontë's).
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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Portraits of Bronte — See images of the only two surviving portraits of Emily Brontë—both painted by her brother Branwell.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Brontë
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