 Hello and welcome back to another GCSE revision lesson now carrying on in the AQA Worlds and Live series. I now want to go over important contextual information that you need to understand when it comes to the poem Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee by Emily Bronte. And as you can see behind me, what I've prepared is a very brief mind map with all the context that you need to understand, especially if you are studying this poem by Emily Bronte as part of AQA's Worlds and Lives Anthology. Okay, so let's go over context before I then do a line by line analysis of the entire poem. Okay, now remember that Emily Bronte is an English writer who lived during the Victorian era. Okay, so she lived between 1818 to 1848 and she specifically was from a village, a fairly small village in West Yorkshire. Okay, now one thing to remember when it comes to Emily Bronte and of course this also the issue of loss. Depression is touched on within this poem is that Emily Bronte herself was no stranger to death and tragedy. Okay, so she herself experienced very significant deaths from very early on in her life. Her mother died when she was just three years old, but then also two of her sisters died from tuberculosis. Okay, this was a disease that used to really ravage people's bodies and even one of my favorite personal writers, a guy called George Orwell, he also died from TB. Okay, tuberculosis. So of course Emily Bronte was no stranger to this disease. Now, when it comes to her life, especially as her life progressed into her 20s, she actually left her small little village in West Yorkshire and went to a slightly larger town called Halifax. Okay, still in West Yorkshire. However, she went to Halifax in her 20s to be a teacher and she even traveled further afield and went to Belgium in Europe. However, Emily Bronte was always very close and very attached to her childhood home and she eventually became very homesick and returned to her village. Okay, so she was really much the home body and she was very attached to where she came from and her childhood home. Okay, also remember that Emily Bronte, as she grew older, okay, she didn't become too old because she died when she was 30, but as she did become older in her 20s, she became quite reclusive and very secluded. Okay, so she started leading a very solitary and reclusive life and unlike what was expected of a lot of Victorian women, she actually never ended up getting married. Okay, so she never married, which ran contrary to what Victorian women were expected to do, which is to get married and have lots of kids. She didn't do any of that. Also, Emily Bronte wrote her books during this time. It was a very sexist society, women who wrote books and clearly if the author was obviously a woman, lots of people wouldn't read it. So Emily Bronte knowing this decided to use a different name, which is what is called a pseudonym when she wrote and published her books. Okay, she uses pseudonym Ellis Bell when she wrote all her books. And bear in mind that as I said, Emily Bronte herself was no stranger to tuberculosis. Okay, not only did it kill her two sisters, but eventually she also succumbed to this illness at 30 and died a very early death. Okay, now when it comes to what she is very famous for, she's famous for two things. Number one, she's known as one of the four Bronte sisters, okay, wildly successful women writers from her family, including herself. And the second thing, of course, is Emily Bronte is author to perhaps her most famous book, which is called Wuthering Heights. Of course, she also wrote lots of poems, one of which we're going to be looking at, but her most famous book is called Wuthering Heights, which is a gothic piece of fiction. And she of course belonged to the famous Bronte sisters, okay. And this particular poem, Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee was written by Emily Bronte. And now when we think about the themes of death that really ran through her own family, but also depression, okay. Of course, even as she became more and more solitary, she also experienced her own bouts of sadness, her own bouts of depression. And this poem is perhaps maybe a reflection of this, okay. And this poem was written in 1841 and published in 1846. And the poem itself has a speaker who begs the subject, the person who they are talking to, to try and find comfort in nature during a very dark time in their period, okay. So you've got a speaker in the poem and they're speaking to a subject and they're telling this person, look, even if you're going through a lot of darkness at this period in your life, try to look at nature for comfort. Also the poem subject, So Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee was once a dreamer, okay. So we get the sense when we read through this poem that this subject was once a dreamer who's very close to nature. They had a very strong affinity to nature, but they then grew very sad, very downcast and this darkness that covered them and enveloped them led them to become distant from nature. So the speaker within the poem is asking the listener to look back to nature and to turn to nature for inspiration as they believe nature will help lift them out of the darkness, okay. So that's really it when it comes to understanding context and key contextual information when it comes to this poem and Emily Bronte's life. So now that you have this understanding, let's go into a line by line analysis of this poem.