IN EMILY BRONTË'S Gondal poem, “How do I love on summer nights” (1842–43), the spirit of Lord Alfred S. gloomily haunts Aspin Castle, shut out from heaven after committing suicide for the love of Queen A.G.A.References to Brontë's works are from Chitham and Roper's edition of her poetry and Nestor's edition of Wuthering Heights. Brontë's central Gondolian figure, A.G.A. dominates every poem in which she appears or is evoked, a ruthless and yet ardent ruler, a powerful rhetorician, the murderer of her newly-born daughter and direct cause of the deaths and exile of her several lovers. Yet for Alfred, A.G.A. is almost divine, inspiring in him a fervent passion from which he cannot escape, even as a ghost. His “angel brow,” the reader is informed, is marked by a “brooding” “shade of deep dispair / As nought devine could ever know,“ intimating the dark depression from which Alfred suffers alone: not even a god could contemplate such misery (ll.37–39). Alfred's despair shifts to delirium once he is within the castle itself, a transition marked by the appearance of a statue of A.G.A. situated in the interior gallery. Now corroded, its form “mouldered all away,” the statue still outshines the other figurines and portraits in the room, and Alfred addresses it as “Sidonia's deity,” a supreme being capable of rousing wild and unruly states of mind.