Mild the Mist Upon the Hill — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Mild the Mist Upon the Hill
The poems
What you need to know
Mild the Mist Upon the Hill by Emily Brontë (1839): a misty evening after rain carries the speaker back to her childhood under her father's roof.
Brontë's life at Haworth and her homesickness, the quatrains and the turn from landscape to memory, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Mild the mist upon the hill', 'No, the day has wept its fill', 'Spent its store of silent sorrow', 'Oh, I'm gone back to the days of youth', 'I am a child once more', 'my father's sheltering roof', 'I watch this cloudy evening fall', 'As thick as morning's tears', 'And dreamy scents of fragrance pass / That breathe of other years'.
Form: four quatrains rhyming ABAB, with shorter, indented second and fourth lines, and personification of the weather ('wept', 'sorrow', 'tears').
Structure: the first stanza describes the evening; the second turns to memory and the present tense of childhood; the last two return to the landscape, now full of the past.
Context: Brontë (1818 to 1848) grew up in Haworth parsonage, where her father was the curate, loved nature and the moors, and was so homesick away from home that she left Roe Head school after a few months; in April 1839 she came home from months of exhausting work teaching at Law Hill School in Halifax.
Compares well with I Remember, I Remember (a childhood home remembered), Captain Cook (To My Brother) (going back to childhood in memory) and Island Man (the senses carrying a speaker to another place).
