Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is known as a great love story because it is the central theme: the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff. This love is the reason for the tragic development of the story; all the other themes like hate, revenge and death (among others) derive from this love between the two main characters. .
But here, we have a kind of love that is very difficult to classify. Some elements would place this kind of love within romantic tradition, like the intense involvement with nature, some mystical references, the wish of death from the lovers, and the most important: the longing for a soul unity with the beloved. But in context with the social background of that time we can confuse this love with that one related to the process of courtship and marriage which leads to the integration in society. For instance, we find this kind of relationship between Catherine and Edgar Linton. .
But in this novel we find another kind of romantic love' in the sense that for romantics Love passion involves suffering, mostly because this romantic love can't be fulfilled, as it happens to the protagonists in the novel; Catherine and Heathcliff cannot find a way to be together except in the grave. This kind of love derives its intensity from unfulfilled desire. .
In the untitled poem she wrote, we can see this suffering for the impossibility of being with the lover; she uses words like grief and woe to describe the intensity of the pain:.
"If grief for grief can touch thee, .
If answering woe for woe,.
If any truth can melt thee,.
Come to me now!-.
This last cry: "Come to me now-, can be related to the cry of Heathcliff in the third chapter when the ghost of Catherine seems to appear:.
"Come in! come in- "Cathy, do come. Oh do - once more-.
Both are laments for this unreachable love. In the poem the voice is lamenting all the suffering her lover may have caused her, as well as the pain reflected in Heathcliff's lament.
