The Poem Spellbound Written by Emily Bronte - Essay Example

Analysis of the Poem “Spellbound” by Emily Bronte The poem “Spellbound” written in 1837 by Emily Bronte is set in the Yorkshire Moors where the poet herself lived most part of her life with sisters Anne and Charlotte. Like the gloomy picture and severe weather condition prevailing in Bronte’s only novel “Wuthering Heights”, a similar setting may be observed in “Spellbound” and is readily felt through the opening line “The night is darkening round me.” Though lacking in specific details that must convey the reasons for the speaker who is fixed to her spot in spite of the harsh encounter with nature, the author’s work subtly figures the collective ground.

Through the worst natural scenario around her, the narrator implicitly communicates her own state of seemingly unbearable emotions which have kept her immobile. No particular reference to determinate feeling is incorporated, perhaps to allude that the woman who finds herself under circumstances of deep thought and heaviest of emotions would most probably cease from moving on as she perceives that nothing can remedy her hopeless case. Without having to state concrete information of her experience, the speaker is made to utilize the imagery in her environment for readers to understand that all internal affairs whether of the mind or of the heart are way beyond the horrible externals.

Such is vivid with each stanza that contains sharp images of frightening wilderness or tragically climatic landscape. Bronte eventually delivers this impact by designating alliteration to relevant phrases in “wild winds” and “bare boughs”. She even renders personification in describing the ‘spell’ the woman is bound with via the third line stating “But a tyrant spell has bound me.” This then justifies the closing of the first stanza where the speaker concludes that she ‘cannot go’, implying how intense the binding spell is that there is apparently nothing about the ‘darkening night’ or the ‘cold wild winds’ that would make her divert to abolishing the spell from within or step out of it.

With ABAB CBCB ABAB rhyme scheme, “Spellbound” is structured in a literary style that possesses a pattern of symmetry. In this manner, the audience can fluidly engage in the main theme becoming convinced to settle at the point of ascertaining the person’s weakness to break away from an invisible control of fate. To arrive at the most definite less startling decision which goes “I will not, cannot go” for the finale, Bronte exhausts to the imagination’s advantage much of the tangible atmosphere that could have had austere effect upon the speaker’s senses yet after some three stages of demonstrating that factors of anxiety from the outside bring no effect, the choice is affirmed by the will.

During the period in which Bronte lived, women of the proper English society were mostly contemplative especially in the midst of hardships. Despite the complications brought by politics, economy, and moral issues which typically associated inferiority complex to women, the latter remained steadfast to obligations for the major part of their living. Even if “Spellbound” does not explicitly show that female gender embodies its central concern, the manifested thought is sufficiently understood by those who have quite profoundly discerned women in several respects.