by Liz Allen

Created on: August 03, 2011

The setting of Emily Bronte's poem “Spellbound” is the Yorkshire Moors in England, the same setting as for her novel “Wuthering Heights.” The speaker is there on a cold winter's night, and the atmosphere is very bleak. Emily Bronte wrote the poem in 1837, at the age of nineteen. She and her sisters, Charlotte and Ann, had imagined a world that they called Gondal. In Gondal, the heroes and heroines they wrote about found themselves in romantic and sometimes tragic circumstances. Juliet

Barker and Fannie Ratchford, both authorities on the poems of Emily Bronte, believe that “Spellbound” revolves around a mother who leaves her child out on the moors to die of exposure. Watching her child die is torture for her, but the woman is under a spell and finds herself unable to walk away. There is, however, no actual reference to a child in the poem. 

The opening line of the poem “Spellbound” tells us that darkness is descending and surrounding the speaker. In the following line, Bronte uses alliteration in the phrase “wild winds” to make the description more vivid; not only are the winds strong, but they are also cold. The word “But” at the beginning of the third line conveys the sense that nobody would want to stay out on a cold, dark night. The speaker, however, is under “a tyrant spell,” the adjective implying that the spell is a particularly harsh, cruel one. Bronte connects the third line to the fourth with enjambment, thus linking the idea that because of the spell, the speaker is unable to leave the place where she is. The repetition of “cannot” emphasises the fact that it is impossible for her to go away. 

The second stanza continues the description of the setting and intensifies the extreme weather conditions. The trees are “giant,” which stresses their size but also perhaps personifies them and creates a sense of fear. Bronte uses alliteration once again in the phrase “bending / their bare boughs.” Snow is laying heavily on the boughs of the trees, so the wintery conditions are indeed severe. In line seven the speaker says that a storm is brewing, but the second stanza closes in a similar way to the first: “And yet I cannot go.” 

In the third and final stanza, Bronte uses repetition to underline the difficult conditions. First of all there are “Clouds beyond clouds” in the sky, then “Wastes beyond

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