The 200-year-old book that instantly took me back to my childhood

By: Patti Smith / The Independent
Translated by: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

She sits writing at the kitchen table, the surrounding landscape battered by strong winds and heavy rain. Beyond her home, the parish cell, lies the overcrowded village of Haworth, a close neighbor to the industrial sprawl of Kittle. The squalid village is a place of suffering and disease, where life expectancy is low and half of children die before they are six.

Yet on October 26, 1829, 13-year-old Charlotte Brontë wrote nothing about it. Nothing about the terrible stench. Nothing about the empty cupboards, the endless chores. Nothing about the deaths of her older sisters and her mother. Nothing about the fear of losing her father, who had been suffering for months from a lung disease. Instead, on small, precious scraps of paper, she wrote a meditative hymn to beauty. Trying to define it, despite the cruel circumstances, she takes a mental journey to a welcoming forest, where everything flourishes in perfect harmony. And when the revelation of nature’s beauty dissipates, she finds refuge in the terrain of her own burgeoning imagination.

Charlotte channels the reflections of one of her characters, who walks through a forest. Through it, she describes with mysterious precision the majesty of the great trees that rise like the masts of tall ships. At the end of November, she unexpectedly recreates the time of Babel, expanding the biblical narrative of Genesis. Driven by an uncontrollable passion for the word, she evokes the atmosphere and the doomed souls who try to discover the location of God through the construction of a forbidden tower.

Her description, which mixes the unexpected with the ordinary, is reminiscent of the paintings of The Tower of Babel painted by Pieter Bruegel. Suddenly, she descends to Earth and offers a calm, serene piece – fourteen lines that she identifies as a sonnet. She delivers a message about the grandeur of nature, but also reminds us of the precious jewels of ordinary appearance: “Beautiful is the bright rainbow, but even more beautiful is the white neck of the swan.” The simplicity is so deeply articulated that it brought tears to my eyes.

I had the privilege of seeing this little miracle, Charlotte's little book, for myself on the day she was born. Although written almost 200 years ago, it has retained the freshness of youth. It is not just a bunch of youthful verses, but the manifestation of an ambitious dreamer. Her perspective takes me back to the world of my childhood.

Like Charlotte, I was the oldest child and could often be seen scribbling little stories to entertain my younger brothers and sisters. I could feel that feeling, when loneliness exploded into a thousand visions, accompanied by an unspoken desire to one day create books that would be read by others. Although I did not have her vocabulary or her precocious literary skills, I knew that energy, that focus, that power of invention that a young writer used as a weapon of kindness.

The Brontë sisters and brother created worlds filled with heroes and drew strange maps of new lands, known only to them. The four of them, united and consumed by passion, sat around the wooden kitchen table, building their own version of Game of Thrones [Game of Thrones]. But in the fall of 1829, from October to December, Charlotte felt the need to create something completely personal.

I picture her again, sitting in a gloomy parish cell on a dark night, warmed only by her creative impulse. In the last, precious scraps of paper, she returns to the rich tapestry of her boundless imagination. In mid-December, with frost obscuring her view and the wild wind shivering her heart, she writes of the dead winter mysteriously transformed. But Charlotte, as if suddenly awakened from her own spell, writes the last words to Autumn song [Autumn Song], surprised by the harsh reality of decay, the day of nature's fading.

How amazing is the range of mind of this teenage girl, who would later write the classic Jane Eyre [Jane Eyre] and the masterpiece Villa [Villette], right there on that wooden kitchen table. She possessed the rare ability to open herself to the dark elements and transform them. For, through all the loss and hardship, she always kept secret the knowledge of her powers which from the age of 13 she nurtured and expressed in her little book of verses – Rhyme book [A Book of Rhymes], Charlotte's early season. /Telegraph/

PS Today, almost two centuries after it was written by Charlotte Brontë at the age of 13, Rhyme book is published for the first time. The hardcover collection contains 10 carefully transcribed poems and is accompanied by a foreword written by the legendary artist – singer, author, poet, painter and photographer Patti Smith. The original book is on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, while the new edition is available for purchase at: www.bronteshop.org.uk