Today’s Poem: Spellbound

Emily Brontë in the moorland of the mind

William Morris Hunt, The Snow Storm, 1859 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Spellbound

by Emily Brontë

The night is darkening round me, 
The wild winds coldly blow; 
But a tyrant spell has bound me 
And I cannot, cannot go. 
 
The giant trees are bending 
Their bare boughs weighed with snow. 
And the storm is fast descending, 
And yet I cannot go. 
 
Clouds beyond clouds above me, 
Wastes beyond wastes below; 
But nothing drear can move me; 
I will not, cannot go. 
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In “Moonlight, Summer Moonlight,” featured here last June, we considered the strange undercurrents that disturb the poems of Emily Brontë (1818–1848). Author of Wuthering Heights, she was the second youngest of the famous literary siblings in the parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire and the fourth to die, months after her brother Branwell, also from tuberculosis. She survives in the reminiscences of her older sister, Charlotte, as a reclusive figure, “not naturally gregarious,” withdrawn into the fantasy world, “Gondal,” whose fabric she and her younger sister Anne continually, into adulthood, wove around themselves.

The note to Today’s Poem in Janet Gezari’s 2006 Penguin edition of Emily Brontë’s Complete Poems indicates the following:

• Although the untitled manuscript is dated November, 1837, this poem did not appear in the 1846 Poems, which Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë had published under the names of Currier, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It’s possible that the poet regarded it simply as an exercise; Gezari notes that it is “incomplete,” although the version we have, filtered through the work of editors whose job it was to decipher Emily Brontë’s handwriting, hangs together as a whole poem with a complete, if brief, lyric trajectory, as we’ll shortly see.
  

• It is one of a series of three poems that seem to have been written together, in sequence. Although at least one critic argues that the three actually constitute a single longer dialogue poem, since their first appearance in print in 1902, they have generally been published as free-standing compositions. (The title “Spellbound” is a post-1902 editorial addition, further marking this poem out as a separate entity.)
  

• At least one scholar considers this poem to be a “Gondal” poem, part of the ongoing body of stories and poems, contributed by both Emily and Anne, that formed the history and mythology of their imagined country. Gezari notes that this twelve-line lyric, in abab trimeter quatrains, with its enchantment-bound speaker, may “relate ‘to an incident when one of the heroines exposes her child to die.’”

That grim note intimates a particular reason for the paralysis of the poem’s speaker. But even absent the “Gondal” connection, the landscape in these three quatrains — again, rather like the landscape of “Moonlight, Summer Moonlight” — is both recognizably the wild Yorkshire moorland and a merciless interior landscape.

Branwell Brontë, Portrait, portraying either Emily or Anne, before 1848 (Wikimedia Commons)

Like everything about her, Brontë’s connection to and identification with this landscape was extreme; her sister Charlotte described her as “a native and a nursling of the moors.” What seems to have been true and common knowledge of her, in her lifetime, is that she was alienatingly intense. The few people outside the family who knew her tended not to like her. Her own siblings found her often tyrannical and sometimes terrifying in the violence of her outbursts. In keeping with the Romantics, but even more in keeping with her own personality, Emily Brontë seems to have found in the wildness of her immediate natural surroundings a mirror for her mind and emotions.

We can connect the poem’s setting to something real, in the knowable external world, but what is happening here is not, strictly speaking, realism. We are in the emotional mirror, not the moorland itself. The paralyzing enchantment that keeps the speaker chained to the spot, even as a winter storm comes on, signals either a moral or an emotional paralysis, or possibly both. The speaker seems not to desire her own destruction in any active sense, at least through the first two stanzas. But whatever the “tyrant spell” actually is, by the third stanza the speaker has chosen to cooperate with it.

In those first two quatrains, the speaker’s position prefigures the later trope of the silent-movie heroine tied to the railroad tracks: the nightfall and the weather are bearing down on her like a freight train, but the “tyrant spell” keeps her tied there. The feminine a-rhymes in stanzas 1 and 2, those lines trailing off in unstressed syllables, exacerbate the sense of her helplessness.

But in the final quatrain, the mood shifts subtly. The speaker remains paralyzed; to the end she insists that she “cannot go.” But where in stanza 1 she “cannot, cannot go,” and in stanza 2, she still “cannot go,” in stanza 3 her predicament becomes a function of her own agency. “I will not, cannot go.” The masculine rhymes in this stanza underscore this new resolution to stay and be devoured by the elements.

In the possible context of the “Gondal” narrative, this resolution makes some sense. At least, it can be traced to a particular action whose consequence it becomes. But it makes sense, too, in the context of Emily Brontë herself. The “spellbound” speaker here may well be recounting the experience of helplessness against the raw elements of her own personality — and ultimately, interestingly, but also tragically, of choosing to surrender.

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