Will the Day Be Bright or Cloudy?

Will the day be bright or cloudy?

Sweetly has its dawn begun

But the heaven may shake with thunder

Ere the setting of the sun

Lady watch Apollo’s journey

Thus thy first born’s course shall be –

If his beams through summer vapours

Warm the earth all placidly

Her days shall pass like a pleasant dream in sweet tranquillity

If it darken if a shadow

Quench his rays and summon rain

Flowers may open buds may blossom

Bud and flower alike are vain

Her days shall pass like a mournful story in care and tears and pain.

If the wind be fresh and free

The wide skies clear and cloudless blue

The woods and fields and golden flowers

Sparkling in sunshine and in dew

Her days shall pass in Glory’s light the world’s drear desert through

Note: There seem to be a number of slightly different versions of this and many of Emily Brontë’s poems, with different line breaks, for example. I’m working from the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets edition, in which the punctuation seems more minimal than in other editions. I did conduct some research but can’t ascertain which is truest to Brontë’s originals.

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‘We've got a house...it certainly is a beauty...Elizabeth Gaskell, in a letter to her friend Eliza Fox in 1850.

‘We've got a house...it certainly is a beauty...I must try and make the house give as much pleasure to others as I can.’ Elizabeth Gaskell, in a letter to her friend Eliza Fox in 1850.

Welcome to 84 PLymouth Grove, Manchester.  For over 150 years, this house has been associated with its most famous resident: the novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell, who lived here from 1850 to 1865.
The House, now a Grade II listed property, was built between 1835-1841 on the outer edge of the growing city.  It was built as part of a new suburban development planned by Richard Lane and is a rare example of the elegant Regency-style villas once popular in Manchester. Thanks to a major £2.5m project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and others, the restored House is fully open to the public for the first time.

During the time Elizabeth lived here she wrote nearly all of her famous novels, including Cranford, Ruth, North and South and Wives and Daughters. She also wrote the biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë, plus many lively letters.

Notable visitors to the House included fellow writers Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, the American abolitionist and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and musician Charles Hallé.
William and his two unmarried daughters, Meta and Julia, continued to live in the house after Elizabeth’s death in 1865.  When Meta died in 1913 the house and its contents were sold.
elizabethgaskellhouse

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