The Full Text of “Spellbound”
1The night is darkening round me,
2The wild winds coldly blow;
3But a tyrant spell has bound me
4And I cannot, cannot go.
5The giant trees are bending
6Their bare boughs weighed with snow,
7And the storm is fast descending,
8And yet I cannot go.
9Clouds beyond clouds above me,
10Wastes beyond wastes below;
11But nothing drear can move me;
12I will not, cannot go.
The Full Text of “Spellbound”
1The night is darkening round me,
2The wild winds coldly blow;
3But a tyrant spell has bound me
4And I cannot, cannot go.
5The giant trees are bending
6Their bare boughs weighed with snow,
7And the storm is fast descending,
8And yet I cannot go.
9Clouds beyond clouds above me,
10Wastes beyond wastes below;
11But nothing drear can move me;
12I will not, cannot go.
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“Spellbound” Introduction
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Emily Brontë wrote "Spellbound" in November 1837, but (like much of her verse) it wasn't published until many years later. In this brief, mysterious poem, a speaker gazes out over a bleak, icy, forbidding landscape. They can see only "wastes beyond wastes" around them, and a storm is coming fast—but, trapped by a "tyrant spell," the speaker can't move from this dangerous spot. Through its vision of paralysis in a dreadful wilderness, the poem conjures a mood of utter despair. Titled "Spellbound" by an editor (Brontë only dated it), the poem was printed in a 1902 volume, Poems, which appeared more than 50 years after its author's death.
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“Spellbound” Summary
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The night is getting darker and darker around me, and cold, harsh winds are blowing. But a cruel, powerful spell has imprisoned me, and I can't leave.
The huge trees are bending, their leafless branches weighed down with snow. The storm is coming on fast. And yet, I can't leave.
Above me I can see nothing but clouds upon clouds; before me I can see nothing but an endless wasteland. But these bleak sights can't move me from this spot: I won't, I can't leave.
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“Spellbound” Themes
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Despair and Powerlessness
Through its vision of a person trapped in a wasteland by sinister magic, "Spellbound" paints a fearful picture of despair. The poem's speaker stands in a gloomy, dangerous landscape. The night is getting darker, the trees creak under a load of snow, a storm is gathering—but the work of a mysterious "tyrant spell" prevents the speaker from escaping. Some kinds of misery, this poem's symbolic world hints, feel like a curse, a paralyzing spell that comes out of nowhere and can't be broken.
The wasteland in which the speaker is trapped is a place whose every feature speaks of bleak sorrow or foreboding. As far as the speaker looks, they can only see "wastes upon wastes" and "clouds upon clouds" an infinite stretch of emptiness. The only living things here are the not-very-lively trees, whose leafless and snow-laden branches show it's the dead of winter. If this poem were the speaker's dream, it'd be clear that they weren't feeling great: symbolically, this landscape suggests a mood in which the whole world seems dead, barren, and even dangerous.
The speaker's great dilemma is that—while they can see that this "drear" landscape is no place to hang around in—they can't move a foot. A "tyrant spell" has "bound" them here, refusing to let them go. The unresolved mystery of who cast this spell and why, again, might invite readers to read the poem symbolically. Being trapped in a terrible place, desperately wanting to leave, and finding oneself unable to move no matter how hard one tries is a vivid image of what it feels like to be grieving, despairing, or deeply depressed.
In this reading, the poem paints a picture of misery through a kind of dream-vision. To be trapped in despair, here, is to feel as if a cruel and inexplicable curse has fallen on you, keeping you from moving from the place you least want to be.
The very last line of the poem, however, offers a subtly different possibility. Rather than simply insisting that they "cannot go" throughout, the speaker here says that they "will not" go—a change that suggests they might be stubbornly confronting their despair, rather than merely paralyzed by it.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Spellbound”
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Lines 1-4
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go."Spellbound" begins on a dark and stormy night that's only getting darker. This is no evening to be out in the weather, but this speaker, caught in the storm, can't stir a foot to escape. A "tyrant spell," they declare, has "bound" them, so that no matter what, they "cannot, cannot go." Readers are left with the image of some poor soul marooned in a chilly night, frozen on the spot—straining to move and unable to stir.
The whooshing alliteration of "wild winds" and the round, mournful assonance of "coldly blow" echo the howling of those winds, bringing the eerie scene to life. Note, too, how the rhythm here and throughout the poem echoes that of a nursery rhyme—three-beat accentual meter, lines that use three regular strong stresses but don't stick to any one kind of metrical foot. Take lines 1-2:
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;These rhythms, combined with the use of plain, straightforward language, only deepen the poem's strangeness and sense of mystery. The merciless spell that holds the speaker here seems to have come out of nowhere. Personified as a "tyrant," a cruel ruler, perhaps it cast itself. Why the spell persecutes the speaker, however, isn't clear. All readers can know is that it leaves the speaker in despair. The helpless, insistent epizeuxis of "I cannot, cannot go" suggests that this poor speaker has tried and failed to stir from the place they're stuck. But all they can do is stand still and watch as the world grows darker and colder and more dangerous all around them.
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Lines 5-8
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow,
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go. -
Lines 9-12
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.
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“Spellbound” Symbols
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The Landscape
The stark, "drear" scene in which the speaker stands paralyzed might be read as a symbol of their inner landscape. Icy winds, heavy snow, and a brewing storm all symbolically suggest tempestuous emotions: sorrow, grief, or just general unbearable misery. And the endless, cheerless landscape, with its few bare trees standing in "wastes beyond wastes," hints at bleak despair.
The fact that the speaker "cannot go" from this place supports a symbolic reading. They've found themselves in an emotional predicament that no one would want to stay in. But such predicaments, alas, can't be escaped at will.
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“Spellbound” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Repetition
No matter what, this poem's speaker can't escape the "drear" and dangerous wilderness where they stand. The poem's repetitions evoke their helplessness (and their futile struggles to escape).
The landscape in which the speaker is trapped feels dangerous and brooding, thanks not just to the speaker's imagery, but to the heavy parallelism with which they frame the scene. Each new element of the scenery gets introduced in the same way:
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;[...]
The giant trees are bending
The anaphora here (the repetition of "the") makes each of these ominous sights and sounds stand out. It's as if the speaker is gazing around at each bad sign one by one, noting them carefully.
Repetitions also capture this landscape's scale. Looking above them, the speaker sees "clouds upon clouds"; looking before them, they see "wastes upon wastes." The diacope in both of those cases evokes a terrible, dreary, endless stretch of pure nothing.
No matter what happens in this wasteland, no matter how dangerous and horrid it is to be there, the poem's speaker is clear on one point: as they say in line 4, they "cannot, cannot go." That moment of epizeuxis introduces a phrasing that will recur (with slight variations) in the last line of each stanza: "And yet I cannot go" in line 8, and "I will not, cannot go" in line 12.
While that refrain stresses the speaker's powerlessness, the little changes between these lines also introduce a note of doubt. Though the speaker always ends up on the idea that they "cannot go," in line 12 they first say that they "will not" go—a flicker of difference that suggests they might have just a tiny bit more agency in this situation than they insist.
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Imagery
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Personification
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Caesura
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Alliteration
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"Spellbound" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Tyrant
- Bound
- Boughs
- Wastes
- Drear
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A "tyrant" is an authoritarian ruler. This "spell" is exerting total control over the speaker.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Spellbound”
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Form
"Spellbound" tells its gloomy tale over the course of three quatrains (or four-line stanzas). Each uses a similar structure: the speaker first describes the terrible landscape in which they're trapped, then reiterates that, no matter what, they "cannot, cannot go" from this place.
The poem's simple form feels as stark and elemental as its setting. There's nothing here but rocks and stones and trees and clouds, and the speaker's plain, repetitive stanzas capture not just that unforgiving scenery, but their powerless predicament. They "cannot go," and it's as simple as that.
The speaker's echoing insistence that they "cannot go" might give this bleak tale the flavor of a ballad: both the landscape and the refrain here feel like something out of a grim old song.
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Meter
Like an eerie nursery rhyme, "Spellbound" is written in accentual meter. That means that, while the poem uses a variety of metrical feet, it sticks to the same number of stressed beats per line (in this case, three).
Around those three steady beats, the poem's rhythm—like the poem's stormy landscape—shifts uneasily. Listen, for instance, to the last stanza:
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.The rocky rhythms of "clouds beyond clouds" and "wastes beyond wastes" summon up images of a place whose skies and lands are equally gnarled, craggy, and ominous. Much as the speaker might want to run from this "drear" and dismal place, they simply can't—and the undisturbed regularity of the last two lines (which use consistent iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "I will") evokes their helpless stillness.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Spellbound" uses an ABAB rhyme scheme. Importantly, the B rhymes chime with each other across the whole poem. No matter what the A rhyme is doing, the B rhymes always return to a long /oh/ sound: blow, snow, below, and—over and over—go. The pattern runs like this across the poem:
ABAB CBCB DBDB
The speaker thus keeps coming back to what they simply cannot do—"go"—making the relentless rhyme scheme mirror their predicament. The poem's rhymes seem paralyzed just as the speaker is. One might even hear the changing A, C, and D rhymes as the speaker's futile struggles against the fate they can't escape.
Notice, too, that the final D rhymes here are slant, matching above me with move me. Perhaps that little clash supports the speaker's one flash of "will," right at the end of the poem: at the same moment the speaker resists moving (rather than just feeling helplessly paralyzed), the rhyme resists perfection.
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“Spellbound” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is an unfortunate soul who, under the sway of a "tyrant spell," finds that they're unable to stir a foot to escape a dreadful wasteland. All they can do is look around at the ominous sights of the wilderness—a storm rolling in, trees bending under a load of snow—and reiterate that they can't move from here.
On the one hand, it's possible to read this poem as a vision of the speaker's inner desolation, a symbolic representation of what it feels like to find yourself helplessly trapped in a bleak emotional predicament.
On the other, there's a tiny hint here that the speaker's own stubbornness plays a role in the drama. In most of the poem, the speaker insists that they "cannot, cannot" leave this spot. In the final line, though, their note subtly changes: there, they "will not, cannot go." Perhaps, then, the speaker's apparent paralysis is a matter of will, too, an internal determination to face terrors and pains—a challenge the speaker refuses to back away from.
Readers might see more than a little of Emily Brontë's own legendary stubbornness, pain, and defiance in this speaker (as well as her eye for a forbidding, windswept landscape). Some critics also suggest that "Spellbound" was one of Brontë's Gondal poems—poems set in the imaginary land of Gondal, which she and her sister Anne created together. Emily Brontë wrote endless tales and poems set in Gondal, and (as readers can see in this page from Emily's diary) Gondal often wove in and out of her daily life. Perhaps this speaker is a tragic figure from that other world; perhaps they speak for Emily herself, who wrote this poem in the bleak November of 1837; perhaps both at once.
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“Spellbound” Setting
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"Spellbound" is set in an icy, craggy wasteland. So far as the speaker can see, nothing lives here but leafless trees, which bend under a load of snow and creak ominously in a cold wind. Above, night gathers and a storm threatens. There's not a speck of beauty or comfort in this wilderness—though perhaps there is a certain grandeur. The speaker's vision of "clouds above clouds" and "wastes beyond wastes" suggests that, if nothing else, the landscape offers a dizzying glimpse of infinity (albeit a grim infinity of turmoil and nothingness).
The speaker's sense that they're trapped here hints that the outer world might symbolize the inner: perhaps the speaker's emotional world presently feels as frozen and empty and paralytic as the landscape they describe.
This windswept place has more than a little in common with Emily Brontë's native Yorkshire, the region of northern England where she spent almost her entire life. (Brontë wrote this poem in November 1837, when snowbound trees and gathering storms would have been ripe for the describing.) But the landscape here may also be drawn from Emily's visions of Gondal, an imaginary land she and her sister Anne dreamed up together. Many of Emily's early writings were set in Gondal; this almost nightmarish symbolic landscape could easily belong to that grand, dark world.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Spellbound”
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Literary Context
The English writer Emily Brontë (1818-1848) composed "Spellbound" as a 19-year-old in 1837. (She didn't give the poem this title herself—that was the choice of later editors.) Like a substantial amount of her poetry, "Spellbound" didn't appear in print until well after her death. It was at last published in a 1902 volume, Poems, which also collected work by her sisters Charlotte and Anne. Born and raised in a remote corner of Yorkshire, these three siblings would become some of the greatest and most important writers of the 19th century.
Emily Brontë is most famous for her groundbreaking novel Wuthering Heights, a book whose stylistic innovations and wild, grotesque characters made an immediate impression on the literary world. (It still influences artists to this day.) But she made her first appearance in print as a poet, and under a pseudonym. After her elder sister Charlotte discovered a collection of poetry that Emily had been working on in private, she persuaded Emily (with serious difficulty—Emily was both stubborn and secretive) to contribute to a family collection of verse, a volume the sisters sold as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846).
Charlotte would later explain:
Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’—we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice [...]
In spite of this all-too-prudent disguise, the original edition of the Poems only sold two copies. The few critical notices the book received, however, were particularly impressed with the poems by "Ellis"—a.k.a. Emily. These would be the only poems she published before her untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 30 (although nearly 200 other poems would be later discovered).
Intensely emotive, preoccupied with love, nature, the imagination, and death, Emily Brontë's work carried on the traditions of the earlier Romantic poets (such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and Gothic novelists. Her work's distinctive independence and wildness, however, was something altogether new.
Historical Context
Some critics believe that "Spellbound" is an episode from the ongoing story of Gondal—a fantasy land invented jointly by Emily and Anne Brontë.
The four Brontë siblings who survived childhood (Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their brother Branwell) together created a fictional world known as Glass Town. Over time, Glass Town branched into two separate worlds: the martial, political Angria was the domain of the elder siblings Charlotte and Branwell, and the darker, moodier Gondal was the domain of the younger siblings Emily and Anne.
Stories from Gondal preoccupied Emily through much of her youth, to the extent that Gondal wove in and out of her daily life (as readers can see in this diary entry, written in the same year she composed "Spellbound"). Much of her secret poetry seems to take place in Gondal—though it also reflects her own stormy emotions.
In many ways, Emily Brontë would live in a private otherworld her whole life. On those few occasions she traveled away from home (to attend school alongside Charlotte, for instance), she hated it. She was always happiest in the seclusion of her native Yorkshire, keeping house for her father at Haworth Parsonage and roaming the moors accompanied by her beloved dog Keeper.
Often remembered as the prickliest and strangest of the Brontë siblings, Emily was a figure not formed to fit neatly into Victorian society's narrow ideals of middle-class womanhood (which demanded a sweet temper, obedience, and a career only as a wife—or a governess in a pinch). As her teacher Constantin Héger said of her:
She should have been a man—a great navigator [...] her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty [...] She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman [...] impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.
For Emily Brontë as for many writers of the 19th century, authorship offered scope for energies the wider world just couldn't accept in a woman.
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More “Spellbound” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Visit the British Library's website to learn more about Emily Brontë's life and work.
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The Poetry of Gondal — See images of some of Emily Brontë's manuscripts, poems copied out in her tiny, meticulous handwriting. These poems (like "Spellbound") are connected to or set in the Brontë children's made-up land, Gondal.
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A Portrait of Brontë — See a portrait of Emily Brontë by her ne'er-do-well brother Branwell.
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Brontë's Influence — Read an article celebrating Emily Brontë's literary legacy—particularly the afterlife of her great novel Wuthering Heights.
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The Poem Set to Music — Listen to a musical interpretation of the poem.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Brontë
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