Sunday, January 09, 2011

Spellbound


Wilsonville in the Snow, originally uploaded by Martina.

On of my favorite things about the Academy of American Poets is that you can sign up with them for a Poem-A-Day email. I look forward to getting my email from them each day. It's a great way to find poetry that you have never read before. Today's poem was Emily Bronte's Spellbound, which I love for its quiet fortitude. Resolve is not about loudness but constancy. It always makes me think of how I felt when my father was dying. I was so tired, but could not leave him to go sleep myself for fear that he might die alone.

Reading it, I could almost convince myself that it was written as a reflection of my own feelings. But that's the beauty of poetry. Good poetry manages to somehow touch the eternal. It unlocks the gates of time, allowing a reader like me to share her own experiences of strife and grief with a woman who died over a hundred years before she was born. That is pretty powerful, when you think about it.

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 dear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

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