0:00:03 > 0:00:06This series is all about the relationships poets have forged
0:00:06 > 0:00:09with different aspects of the British landscape.
0:00:11 > 0:00:18Moorland, this bare, wild upland country has often provided writers with the perfect setting
0:00:18 > 0:00:23to evoke sensations of drama, menace and alienation.
0:00:23 > 0:00:24And it isn't hard to see why.
0:00:24 > 0:00:29Standing here in the middle of this bleakly imposing Yorkshire moorland,
0:00:29 > 0:00:34you can't help but feel insignificant, almost consumed by the landscape.
0:00:34 > 0:00:38This landscape has featured in the work of many writers,
0:00:38 > 0:00:42but the poet who I think captures a unique vision of these Moors wasn't even British.
0:00:42 > 0:00:46In fact, she only came to Yorkshire a few times.
0:00:46 > 0:00:50She was the young American poet Sylvia Plath.
0:01:23 > 0:01:29Sylvia Plath wrote some of the most striking, original and widely-read modern poetry.
0:01:29 > 0:01:34Unfortunately, the mythology surrounding her personal life,
0:01:34 > 0:01:40her marriage to the celebrated poet Ted Hughes, her mental health problems, and her tragic suicide has
0:01:40 > 0:01:45tended to sometimes overshadow the richness and variety of her writing.
0:01:47 > 0:01:51Sylvia Plath is most famous for the poems of intense personal drama
0:01:51 > 0:01:54written in the last months of her life.
0:01:54 > 0:01:57Few people would think of her as being a landscape poet,
0:01:57 > 0:02:03and yet throughout her prolific career, Plath wrote a number of vivid poems of place.
0:02:03 > 0:02:10One of the best of these is a strange and immensely powerful piece called Wuthering Heights.
0:02:10 > 0:02:13It's set on the Yorkshire Moors, and after reading it,
0:02:13 > 0:02:18I wanted to make the hike up to the moor top ruin that not only inspired
0:02:18 > 0:02:25Emily Bronte's classic novel, but also this brilliant and chilling poem of Sylvia Plath's.
0:02:30 > 0:02:33"There is no life higher than the grass tops or the hearts of sheep
0:02:33 > 0:02:39"and the wind pours by like destiny, bending everything in one direction.
0:02:41 > 0:02:45"I can feel it trying to funnel my heat away.
0:02:45 > 0:02:52"If I pay the roots of the heather too close attention, they will invite me to whiten my bones among them."
0:02:54 > 0:02:57It's disturbing, visceral writing,
0:02:57 > 0:03:02a poem in which the poet and the landscape she is describing seem to be merging into one,
0:03:02 > 0:03:08as if Plath is evoking the moorland world purely to reflect her own state of mind.
0:03:10 > 0:03:16Sylvia Plath wrote a sequence of seven poems about the Yorkshire Moors between 1956 and '61.
0:03:16 > 0:03:19Before heading up to Wuthering Heights,
0:03:19 > 0:03:22I wanted to look at a couple of these earlier Moors poems,
0:03:22 > 0:03:24both written what she was in her early twenties -
0:03:24 > 0:03:28Hardcastle Crags and The Great Carbuncle.
0:03:28 > 0:03:34Both of these poems feed powerfully into the five concise verses of Wuthering Heights,
0:03:34 > 0:03:37written several years later when Plath was 28.
0:03:42 > 0:03:46The young British poet Clare Pollard is an admirer of Plath's work.
0:03:46 > 0:03:49When most people think of Sylvia Plath's poetry,
0:03:49 > 0:03:52I think they're really thinking about her later poems,
0:03:52 > 0:03:57those intensely personal works, and maybe not her landscape work. Do you think that's right?
0:03:57 > 0:03:59Yeah, I think people mainly think of
0:03:59 > 0:04:04the domestic landscapes, the beekeeping,
0:04:04 > 0:04:06we think of her in a flat with the baby,
0:04:06 > 0:04:11and also these very intensely private mythic worlds, the world in her head.
0:04:11 > 0:04:16We don't think of her as a nature poet at all, I don't think, and yet if you look at
0:04:16 > 0:04:20her collected poems, you see she does engage with the outer world,
0:04:20 > 0:04:24she is intensely interested in the outside world and in writing landscape poetry.
0:04:25 > 0:04:32But where did Plath's fascination with the Yorkshire Moors stem from, and what was she doing in England?
0:04:32 > 0:04:37Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932 into a family of academics,
0:04:37 > 0:04:42and she had written poetry intensively throughout her childhood and adolescence.
0:04:42 > 0:04:46She was a straight-A student, but being so driven took its toll
0:04:46 > 0:04:50and in her late teens she suffered a breakdown.
0:04:50 > 0:04:56Yet, despite this, she went on to graduate top of her class and September 1955, aged 22,
0:04:56 > 0:04:58she arrived in Britain,
0:04:58 > 0:05:05having won a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to the women's college of Newnham in Cambridge.
0:05:05 > 0:05:10Her acceptance here meant the world for Sylvia Plath, it really was her dream come true.
0:05:10 > 0:05:16She had huge expectations about what her time here at Newnham would bring for her.
0:05:16 > 0:05:19She was also, clearly, fiercely ambitious.
0:05:19 > 0:05:24When you read her journal, it is quite funny to see how keen she is to meet the right people.
0:05:24 > 0:05:27She'd come here to conquer the literary landscape.
0:05:30 > 0:05:32'I had always idolised England because I think,
0:05:32 > 0:05:37'with an English major, especially, you think that here it all began,
0:05:37 > 0:05:42'and you want to walk under Milton's mulberry tree at Cambridge and you remember all the Dickens that
0:05:42 > 0:05:47'you read when you were little, and this is simply a literary influence.'
0:05:47 > 0:05:49Sylvia Plath would have been delighted
0:05:49 > 0:05:54to find that she has since become one of those Cambridge literary legends.
0:05:55 > 0:06:01I went to talk to some of the undergraduates at Newnham College today about Sylvia and her poetry.
0:06:04 > 0:06:09I think she's definitely an icon, she made herself into an icon with
0:06:09 > 0:06:13her struggles and how she's perceived to be a sufferer.
0:06:14 > 0:06:19People tend to have a romanticised view about some of her poetry,
0:06:19 > 0:06:23that stereotype of 16-year-old girls in dark rooms reading The Bell Jar.
0:06:26 > 0:06:28Sometimes fans of Sylvia Plath's work
0:06:28 > 0:06:32get something of a name for themselves for being quite fanatical.
0:06:32 > 0:06:38Is there any kind of embarrassment being at Newnham, saying you're a fan of Sylvia Plath's work?
0:06:38 > 0:06:43People imagine Sylvia Plath is equal to teen angst,
0:06:43 > 0:06:46but I think she has that raw emotion that teenagers,
0:06:46 > 0:06:49when they are going through a certain stage, respond to.
0:06:49 > 0:06:52As Sylvia was writing the journals, some of those early poems,
0:06:52 > 0:06:57she was only a couple of years older than you lot, she was 23 years old,
0:06:57 > 0:07:02and yet she's so focused, heaping all of these expectations upon herself.
0:07:02 > 0:07:04Is that kind of drive unusual?
0:07:05 > 0:07:09I think everyone at Cambridge is terrifying!
0:07:09 > 0:07:14Everybody works hard to get here, everybody's ambitious and everyone has aims to be the best they can.
0:07:14 > 0:07:17In that way, I don't think she's unusual from any of us here.
0:07:17 > 0:07:23I think the difference with Sylvia is that she had the guts to admit that she wanted to go somewhere
0:07:23 > 0:07:25and that she wanted to make something of it.
0:07:25 > 0:07:30When I read her journal, it's just full of bits where she says to herself, "Shape up,
0:07:30 > 0:07:34"this term, this year, you will do well, you will do this, you will do that,"
0:07:34 > 0:07:37and I find myself saying, "Yes, yes, I will!"
0:07:37 > 0:07:40And then I think, am I taking advice from Sylvia Plath?
0:07:40 > 0:07:44And then I think, maybe I do want to be a brilliant poet like her, who wouldn't?
0:07:44 > 0:07:46But maybe that's also quite terrifying,
0:07:46 > 0:07:50that there is that part of Sylvia Plath that is so recognisable.
0:07:50 > 0:07:52Do you think she was happy here?
0:07:52 > 0:07:56It's where she fell in love with Ted Hughes, so I think there are
0:07:56 > 0:08:01moments where she was possibly in the full flushes of romance. So maybe she was happiest here.
0:08:01 > 0:08:07She was a very feminine, very warm person.
0:08:07 > 0:08:10She had many minor loves in her life,
0:08:10 > 0:08:14and each time would retreat in a disillusioned way because either
0:08:14 > 0:08:18there was jealousy because of the time her writing consumed,
0:08:18 > 0:08:23the dedication she was willing to give it,
0:08:23 > 0:08:27and the emerging success she was receiving.
0:08:29 > 0:08:34Only a few months after arriving in Cambridge, Sylvia met Ted Hughes
0:08:34 > 0:08:37at a party celebrating the launch of a student poetry magazine.
0:08:40 > 0:08:42'I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine,
0:08:42 > 0:08:44'I was impressed and wanted to meet him.
0:08:44 > 0:08:50'I went to this little celebration, and that's where we met.
0:08:50 > 0:08:56'We kept writing poems to each other, then it grew out of that, I guess,
0:08:56 > 0:09:01'a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fun time,
0:09:01 > 0:09:03'we decided we should keep on.'
0:09:03 > 0:09:07'The poems haven't really survived, the marriage overtook the poems.'
0:09:07 > 0:09:12Sylvia and Ted were married in a secret wedding just four months after they met.
0:09:12 > 0:09:15Following the honeymoon in September 1956,
0:09:15 > 0:09:18Ted took her home to his parents' house in Heptonstall,
0:09:18 > 0:09:22a village perched on the moor tops above the Calder Valley.
0:09:23 > 0:09:28Until they arrived, Ted's parents didn't even know that their youngest son had a wife.
0:09:31 > 0:09:35Sylvia arrived eager to make a good impression on her new in-laws,
0:09:35 > 0:09:42but also to immerse herself in everything this foreign landscape offered her as a writer.
0:09:44 > 0:09:47It was a very exciting period in her life.
0:09:47 > 0:09:51At the same time, you could understand how it could have all got a bit much for her.
0:09:51 > 0:09:57She was a young wife, staying here with her husband's family for the first time.
0:09:57 > 0:10:00She was in a very different culture, and on top of it all,
0:10:00 > 0:10:03this good old Yorkshire weather must have been a stark contrast to
0:10:03 > 0:10:06the bright skies that she was used to back home in America.
0:10:06 > 0:10:12However, at some level, her Yorkshire experiences were all grist to her poetry.
0:10:12 > 0:10:16Here in the Pennines, she discovered a landscape that was at once alien
0:10:16 > 0:10:20and yet at the same time inspirational.
0:10:20 > 0:10:24This double-edged relationship with a forbidding, foreign environment
0:10:24 > 0:10:27is the recurring subject through Plath's sequence of Moors poems.
0:10:27 > 0:10:34And one that culminates in Wuthering Heights, where she finally seems to claim the landscape as her own.
0:10:34 > 0:10:40She couldn't have written that great poem, Wuthering Heights,
0:10:40 > 0:10:48without first writing those other Yorkshire poems that came before it, one of which began right here.
0:11:45 > 0:11:50When you head out into the rough country beyond Heptonstall village,
0:11:50 > 0:11:55with those terse and stoney sounds resonating around your head, you can't help but sense
0:11:55 > 0:12:00that menace which Plath evokes lurking behind every rock and tree.
0:12:00 > 0:12:03It's an eerie place to go walking.
0:12:06 > 0:12:10This is Hardcastle Crags, the place, for me,
0:12:10 > 0:12:16where the journey of Sylvia Plath and her relationship with the Yorkshire landscape takes off.
0:12:16 > 0:12:20The poem that she wrote and named after this place
0:12:20 > 0:12:23was her first really exciting poem about the Yorkshire Moors,
0:12:23 > 0:12:29and it contains, I think, all of the raw materials of her later work about this landscape.
0:12:29 > 0:12:35There is imagery of the grasses, that touch of the occult, the landscape being threatening,
0:12:35 > 0:12:39something that very much challenges her, that she has to stand up to.
0:12:56 > 0:13:01Although these images are good, and they do work, and help you to see this place,
0:13:01 > 0:13:07they don't quite, yet, have that uniquely strange quality that we associate with her work.
0:13:07 > 0:13:14That's because this is a young poet who is still negotiating her way through this environment,
0:13:14 > 0:13:17still finding out how she wants to write about it.
0:13:19 > 0:13:24Most of Plath's Yorkshire writing picks up on a sense of the supernatural.
0:13:24 > 0:13:29Along with the often haunting atmosphere of the Moors themselves, Ted also introduced his new wife
0:13:29 > 0:13:32to the local folklore and superstitions.
0:13:32 > 0:13:36One of the most interesting things about being up here in Yorkshire is discovering
0:13:36 > 0:13:39how strong the culture of story-telling still is,
0:13:39 > 0:13:42and specifically the telling of ghost stories.
0:13:42 > 0:13:47I went to a pub on the edge of Widdup Moor to hear some of these folk tales for myself.
0:13:49 > 0:13:55She hung herself in the corridor down there, and that's her chair over by the bar.
0:13:56 > 0:14:01Anybody comes in now and she doesn't like them,
0:14:01 > 0:14:04the front door bangs to.
0:14:04 > 0:14:10And he sat down in the chair, and as he did the door banged and the wind
0:14:10 > 0:14:14whistled round and opened these doors as well, and they banged.
0:14:14 > 0:14:16So he had the double doors.
0:14:16 > 0:14:18He never sat in the chair again.
0:14:18 > 0:14:22She was different to everybody else because she had an inheritance,
0:14:22 > 0:14:25she wasn't like the other women, she didn't want to get married.
0:14:25 > 0:14:28But there are lots of stories about how she sold her soul to the devil
0:14:28 > 0:14:34and used to fly across from the Eagle-shaped cliff down over there and fly across to Pendle Hill
0:14:34 > 0:14:39and mix with the other witches, but eventually she was caught when her hand was chopped off,
0:14:39 > 0:14:45and the boy who was looking out for the cats whacked off a paw, but then it turned back into a hand,
0:14:45 > 0:14:50and when he took it back to the house where Lady Cybil lived with her husband,
0:14:50 > 0:14:55the blood was pumping from her wrist and she had to admit that she was a witch.
0:14:55 > 0:14:58It was these kind of stories that Sylvia Plath would have heard.
0:14:58 > 0:15:02I'm sure that it's the quality of those stories that has fed into
0:15:02 > 0:15:10the poems that she wrote about this place, and that has lent them that slightly haunting tone.
0:15:10 > 0:15:16It's an entirely appropriate tone because it does capture an essence of what it feels like to be here.
0:15:16 > 0:15:19The Moors are quite an eerie place.
0:15:19 > 0:15:22They can feel very other-worldly.
0:15:25 > 0:15:30The second of Sylvia's poems that I wanted to explore before making my way to Wuthering Heights
0:15:30 > 0:15:34was written after a trip to Yorkshire in June 1957.
0:15:36 > 0:15:43This poem draws deeply on the supernatural dimension of the Moors and is called The Great Carbuncle.
0:15:56 > 0:16:03What I find really interesting is that as Sylvia Plath's relationship with these Moors develops,
0:16:03 > 0:16:07she increasingly brings more of herself into the poems she writes about them.
0:16:11 > 0:16:16In The Great Carbuncle she does this by fusing her experience here
0:16:16 > 0:16:19with a short story from her own literary heritage.
0:16:19 > 0:16:23A story by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne.
0:16:23 > 0:16:27In the story, a group of explorers travel out into the wilderness
0:16:27 > 0:16:32in search of a gem of great brightness, the Great Carbuncle.
0:16:32 > 0:16:36Which you'd imagine to be pretty handy should the mist suddenly
0:16:36 > 0:16:42come down and you can't see a thing in any direction whatsoever.
0:17:32 > 0:17:36There's a kind of strangeness that makes the landscape almost surreal.
0:17:36 > 0:17:40I think you certainly get that in poems like The Great Carbuncle,
0:17:40 > 0:17:44which has an extraordinary tour de force,
0:17:44 > 0:17:49both Plath exploring the landscape but exploring the atmosphere and the light.
0:17:49 > 0:17:52It's quite beautiful but quite terrifying at the same time.
0:17:52 > 0:17:55She's still early on in her writing life, still a young poet.
0:17:55 > 0:17:59I was just wondering what you thought these early poems
0:17:59 > 0:18:03tell us about the poet that she would be later on.
0:18:03 > 0:18:05Already technically assured.
0:18:05 > 0:18:10You feel, as a reader, you are in the hands of a completely safe poet.
0:18:10 > 0:18:13Powers of observation are fantastic.
0:18:13 > 0:18:16Jo Shapcot is one of Britain's leading poets.
0:18:16 > 0:18:20And after moving to remote hill country in the Welsh borders,
0:18:20 > 0:18:25she was inspired to write a sequence of short, two-verse poems.
0:18:25 > 0:18:27Like Plath, I was an urban stranger to the hills.
0:18:27 > 0:18:31I also, like her, responded to the light.
0:18:31 > 0:18:33Glass Coombe.
0:18:34 > 0:18:40"This slope has wings, as do our bats and the dragonflies and every bird
0:18:40 > 0:18:46"flaunting as if resting on updrafts could make a creature invisible.
0:18:46 > 0:18:50"Look, the light doesn't lie heavy on us at all.
0:18:50 > 0:18:54"We can move our legs and arms through the honey
0:18:54 > 0:18:58"and even the grass wears its worms with grace."
0:19:02 > 0:19:05The British writer who fired Plath's imagination from a young age,
0:19:05 > 0:19:09and with whom she shared the same Gothic sensibilities,
0:19:09 > 0:19:15was Emily Bronte, author of that famous moorland novel of romantic passion, Wuthering Heights.
0:19:17 > 0:19:22Newly married and full of own literary ambitions, it must have been thrilling for Sylvia
0:19:22 > 0:19:27to come to Bronte country, and with her very own Heathcliff in tow.
0:19:27 > 0:19:30It's no surprise that when Sylvia Plath got here
0:19:30 > 0:19:33she came to have a look at the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth.
0:19:33 > 0:19:39This was the home of those famous literary Bronte sisters who must have cast such a shadow of
0:19:39 > 0:19:43influence and ambition over the young Sylvia Plath while she was here.
0:19:43 > 0:19:47The Brontes were a truly impressive family.
0:19:47 > 0:19:50I can imagine the 23-year-old Sylvia wandering through these rooms
0:19:50 > 0:19:54and drawing comparisons with the illustrious sisters.
0:19:54 > 0:19:58Like Sylvia, they'd started writing from an early age
0:19:58 > 0:20:00and Charlotte and Emily went on
0:20:00 > 0:20:04to achieve Sylvia's dream of publishing iconic novels before they were 30.
0:20:07 > 0:20:14Sylvia's time in Yorkshire didn't only inspire poetry but articles and short stories as well.
0:20:14 > 0:20:17And her literary career received a huge boost
0:20:17 > 0:20:22when the prestigious New Yorker magazine accepted Hardcastle Crags for publication.
0:20:22 > 0:20:28The 350 fee for the poem was enough to pay the rent on her and Ted's apartment
0:20:28 > 0:20:31when they moved to Boston for the summer of 1958.
0:20:31 > 0:20:38Sylvia's travels with Ted around America gave her a whole new range of landscapes to write about.
0:20:38 > 0:20:42After they returned to England, Hardcastle Crags appeared in
0:20:42 > 0:20:45her first collection of published poems, The Colossus.
0:20:45 > 0:20:50By August 1961, Sylvia and Ted had a young daughter and were expecting a second child
0:20:50 > 0:20:55when they decided to move from London to a village near Dartmoor in Devon.
0:20:55 > 0:21:00Tragically, it was here, a year later, that their marriage fell apart.
0:21:00 > 0:21:07However, shortly after the move, being near moorland again, Sylvia wrote a poem that was based on
0:21:07 > 0:21:12her memories of this extraordinary hike from Haworth up to the windswept ruin of the Top Withins,
0:21:12 > 0:21:17the supposed location of Heathcliffe's manor in the Bronte novel.
0:21:17 > 0:21:23It was this forlorn place that inspired it Sylvia's most original evocation of the Moors.
0:21:23 > 0:21:25Her own Wuthering Heights.
0:23:47 > 0:23:50What a fantastic walk.
0:23:50 > 0:23:53It's an incredibly thrilling landscape anyway
0:23:53 > 0:24:00but walking up here with the lines of Plath's poem in my head, it was even more charged with energy.
0:24:00 > 0:24:06Everywhere I looked, I kept seeing part of the poems, the grass distractedly beating its head,
0:24:06 > 0:24:12the black stones of the walls, and then feeling this wind pouring by like destiny, how she says.
0:24:12 > 0:24:16But, of course, this is why Plath came here, for this building.
0:24:16 > 0:24:20So I'm going to have a look inside.
0:24:20 > 0:24:24Although this ruin has no specific association with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights,
0:24:24 > 0:24:28it's exposed position right on the top of the Moors
0:24:28 > 0:24:33is thought to have inspired the setting of Heathcliff's fictional manor.
0:24:33 > 0:24:36You can only am imagine how excited she would have been to get here.
0:24:36 > 0:24:43One of the main reasons she was so keen to come to Britain was because of its literary history.
0:24:43 > 0:24:45And here she was literally immersed in it.
0:24:49 > 0:24:51But where you sense in her earlier writing
0:24:51 > 0:24:55that this weight of literary history might have been intimidating,
0:24:55 > 0:25:01now she has the confidence to take the title Wuthering Heights and tell her own story.
0:25:04 > 0:25:07As well as a seriousness and a passion, she has always been
0:25:07 > 0:25:14wonderful at rooting into her subconscious for exactly the right image to express an emotion.
0:25:14 > 0:25:17But also a kind of wit,
0:25:17 > 0:25:23a great humour that really expresses itself wonderfully in Wuthering Heights in the sheep.
0:25:23 > 0:25:27Although the sheep are sinister, they're also a bit silly and old womanish.
0:25:27 > 0:25:30She characterises that beautifully.
0:25:30 > 0:25:32It's deft, wonderfully deft.
0:25:37 > 0:25:44For me, one of the most successful things about Wuthering Heights is the way that Sylvia Plath
0:25:44 > 0:25:50captures this environment, by using some incredibly startlingly surprising imagery.
0:25:50 > 0:25:53For example, in Hardcastle Crags, although her line,
0:25:53 > 0:25:58"the incessant seethe of grasses riding in the fall of the moon"
0:25:58 > 0:26:01works, and is a really vivid description, in Wuthering Heights,
0:26:01 > 0:26:08she takes us to a whole new level when she writes "the grass is beating its head distractedly.
0:26:08 > 0:26:11"It is too delicate for a life in such company.
0:26:11 > 0:26:13"Darkness terrifies it."
0:26:13 > 0:26:18We know that although she has got exactly the right image for the grasses up there,
0:26:18 > 0:26:21that she is also talking about herself.
0:26:21 > 0:26:25So the grasses and her state of mind have become one.
0:26:25 > 0:26:29So it is a fantastic landscape poem and, for me,
0:26:29 > 0:26:35one of her best because although her psychology is very present in it, it's still a landscape poem which
0:26:35 > 0:26:41brings this environment to vital life in a really amazing way.
0:26:42 > 0:26:48Wuthering Heights must have been a poem that Sylvia Plath rated highly, as she made it the opening
0:26:48 > 0:26:53to Crossing The Water, the second collection she had planned for publication.
0:26:53 > 0:27:00Tragically, Sylvia didn't live to see this or her third and most famous collection, Ariel, published.
0:27:00 > 0:27:05However, almost 20 years after her death, her collected poems won the Pulitzer Prize,
0:27:05 > 0:27:12and today she is recognised as one of modern poetry's most important voices and a pioneering figure.
0:27:12 > 0:27:18There's absolutely no denying that Sylvia Plath has had a huge impact on women poets.
0:27:18 > 0:27:25Many have either felt they've have to define themselves against her in a completely different way...
0:27:25 > 0:27:31Myself, certainly, she was the first poet I really read seriously, and she had a huge impact on me.
0:27:33 > 0:27:39It was in conversation with this landscape that the young Sylvia Plath developed her poetic voice.
0:27:39 > 0:27:43In return, she has made these Yorkshire Moors live on the page
0:27:43 > 0:27:48in a wholly new way, through the poems they inspired her to write.
0:27:53 > 0:27:56In all Sylvia Plath's moor poems, the landscape is threatening,
0:27:56 > 0:28:00apparently intent on snuffing the quick of her small heat out.
0:28:00 > 0:28:03And on the whole it would seem that it's successful,
0:28:03 > 0:28:09because of the end of those poems, she does retreat from the moorland and returns to the lowland lights.
0:28:09 > 0:28:12But Wuthering Heights is different.
0:28:12 > 0:28:18And at the end she doesn't retreat from the Moors but chooses instead to stay put up on the high ground.
0:28:18 > 0:28:23For me, this gives the close of the poem a real sense of victory, as if
0:28:23 > 0:28:28by imprinting the landscape with her unique vision and imagination,
0:28:28 > 0:28:31she powerfully claims it as her own.
0:28:51 > 0:28:54Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
0:28:54 > 0:28:57E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk