Continuing our Halloween Series featuring some of our listener’s favorite fantasy and supernatural pieces from the seven years of the Parlando Project we get to today’s short Emily Brontë poem “Spellbound.”   Once more we have an eerie situation with withheld information that adds to the mystery while paradoxically compelling our attention.

Before beginning the Parlando Project I was only aware that Emily Brontë had written poetry, holding that fact as having no other consequence. I’m not even sure what drew me into her poetry — memory fades — but it may have been finding out that another Emily, Emily Dickinson, read it. Brontë’s poetry, which preceded her famous novel Wuthering Heights,  was at least partially extracted from a series of writings she and her young siblings created within a set of fantasy worlds — and though this short discussion of Emily and Anne Brontë’s imagined world of Gondal doesn’t list this poem as being part of that universe, “Spellbound’s”  setting doesn’t sound out of place from the northern, winter island in their Gondal.

Nor out of place in the northern U.S. where I live, where the wind and weather is casting us to cold with predictions of snow and ice within the next 24 hours. When I first presented this poem three years ago,* I was intrigued by the prepositional position that the poem’s speaker seems to be in. In the poem they say that clouds are above them and the wintery wastes are below. It could be that Brontë was only envisioning a highlands or hillside perspective, but my mind’s eye had the spellbound speaker suspended, frozen in mid-air. Perhaps again, my imagination overtook me in that detail, but then I’m glad for Brontë’s imagination which created this chilling and enchanting poem that let me picture that.

Another illustration created by enchanting Adobe’s Firefly with an incantation. Firefly claims that it doesn’t use uncompensated artists work in its AI model.

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I rather like the music I came up with for this one. Maybe you will too. An audio player is below for many of you so you can hear the performance of it, but some ways of reading this blog will suppress that page element, and so I also offer this alternative: a highlighted link that will open its own audio player gadget.

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*If you follow this link to my original presentation of “Spellbound”  you can see the lyrics as part of a chord sheet in case you would like to perform this song yourself.