Spellbound by Emily Bronte

1. Spellbound by Emily Bronte •

2. Context • Context • Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was the middle sister of the three most famous sisters in the history of English Literature. (Her oldest sister was called Charlotte; Anne was the youngest; and she had a brother called Branwell). All of them died tragically young. • Charlotte discovered Emily's talent for writing poetry and the three sisters published a collection of poems under the pseudonyms Ellis, Currer and Acton Bell (each sister kept their own initial). They did this to avoid suffering the prejudice against women writers typical of the time.

3. Context • Emily is best known for her novel, Wuthering Heights. The setting for this novel was the bleak and harsh Yorkshire Moors which she knew very well. Emily was born and bred and lived for most of her short life in Haworth, Yorkshire, where there is now a museum about the family. • She caught a cold while attending the funeral of her brother and it developed into tuberculosis, from which she died, six days before Christmas Day in 1848.

4. What is Gondal? • Gondal is an imaginary world created by Emily and her siblings where their imaginations could run riot. In this world, heroes and heroines fought great battles and were involved in epic, romantic situations. It is thought that Spellbound, written in November 1837 when Emily was 19, is set in Gondal, even though the setting seems very much like the bleak Yorkshire Moors in which Emily lived. • It has been suggested that the poem describes an incident in which one of their imaginary heroines has to leave her child to die on the mountains in winter. The heroine can neither watch nor leave: she is spellbound by her circumstances.

5. Structure and language • Form • Spellbound is written in the simple verse form of three four-line stanzas with an a-b-a-b rhyme scheme. • Structure • Although the poem is divided into three stanzas this doesn't mean there is progression, movement or change in this poem. Each stanza deals with the same thing - the narrator cannot bear to leave the place, even though the conditions are awful. • Sound • Spellbound is so simply written it's almost like a nursery rhyme. Nursery rhymes are characterised by repetition and so is this poem. There are also lots of vowel sounds, particularly ones rooted in 'o', which might make one think of 'oh' (an expression of sadness) and 'woe' (sadness itself).

6. Imagery • There are two areas to note here. First is the bleak imagery used to describe the weather: The night is darkening round me, The wild winds coldly blow Their bare boughs weighed with snow Clouds beyond clouds above me, Wastes below wastes below • The second noteworthy technique, repetition, also emphasises the bleak conditions and imagery. Brontë repeats the same structure (stanzas and rhymes) and the same vocabulary to emphasise her message that she "cannot go".

7. Attitudes and ideas • One attitude clearly set out in the poem is the resistance to authority or power. The "tyrant spell" could be misleading. It is perhaps not a tyrant who has cast the spell... but the spell itself that is the tyrant. The storm is trying to force the narrator to retreat but at the end the narrator seems to take control with the statement "I will not, cannot go".

8. Themes • Weather: the storm is a pathetic fallacy (when inanimate objects are given human qualities (like the 'cruel sea')). This definition has widened to include weather reflecting the mood of a character. As the narrator in Spellbound is having an incredibly traumatic, turbulent time the poem is set in a storm. Weather is often used to reflect mood. • Power: there seems to be a power struggle going on but it is difficult to pinpoint who it is between. Is it between the narrator and the character (not mentioned in the poem) who has forced this woman to give up her child? Or between nature and humanity?

9. Themes • The relationship between man and nature: this poem deals with this theme. Humanity is part of nature but also distinct from it in many ways. Humanity is not dominant over nature. • Power: nature is seen as more powerful than man in one way or another. • A sense of threat: the human character in the poem feels under threat at one point or another. • Isolation: the human characters are all alone • Nature's beauty: the poem reflects this to some degree but one could argue that there is a raw, savage beauty even in the most hostile poem like Spellbound.

10. Question: How does Brontë create a negative impression of nature in Spellbound? • Answer- This poem begins with a negative, threatening image - "The night is darkening round me" - and gets even more dark and savage as it progresses. In fact, you could argue that there is negativity of some kind on every line. • In the first stanza, we get the sense that night itself is hostile. The sun is not merely setting but the night seems to be enveloping the narrator, "darkening round me". In the next line, the wind is "wild" and blowing "coldly". Line three has the deeply negative image of the "tyrant spell" that has "bound" the narrator. • The stanza ends, as does each stanza, with the defeated statement that she "cannot go". • Nature takes a turn for the worse in the second stanza as the "giant trees are bending" due to the massive amount of snow weighing down their "bare boughs". The storm is not simply continuing but is "fast descending".