Charlotte Bronte's Poetics: A Study of 'Pilate's Wife's Dream'

Charlotte Bronte's poetry has often been dismissed as inferior to her sisters' and uninteresting in its own right. Using her poem 'Pilate's Wife's Dream' as a representative example, this article will illustrate some of Charlotte's strengths and weaknesses as a poet. In this poem, the strengths include her use of end-rhyme, rhetorical devices (particularly personification) and characterization as a part of her boldly creative expansion of a few biblical verses; among its weaknesses are her unimaginative use of the stanza form, her prosaic syntax and her pedestrian metre. Despite these shortcomings, 'Pilate's Wife's Dream' has great literary merit, indicating that Charlotte Bronte's poetry is worthy of further critical attention.