Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem brought to you this month by bibliophiles. I'm Heidi White,

and today is Monday, February 7th. And today I'm going to read for you a poem by English poet and

novelist Emily Bronte. Emily Bronte lived from 1818 to 1848, which is not very long. She died at age 30, and she left behind a single novel, very famous, called Wuthering Heights. And that is, of course, what she is best known for. It's one of the greatest novels in the English language. You should run, not walk, to read Wuthering Heights

if you haven't already. But she was also a poet. And today's poem is called spellbound.

And this is how it goes. The night is darkening round me. The wild winds coldly blow.

But a tyrant spell has bound 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 wade with snow, and the storm is fast descending, and yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me, wastes beyond wastes below,

but nothing drear can move me.

I will not, cannot go.

I chose this poem because it is the dead of winter, right?

There's just dirty snow everywhere here in Colorado.

There's snow coming again this weekend.

There's this sense of winter behind us and winter before us.

It's right in the middle.

And this poem, I think, captures that very well, adding another layer of intensity with the personal element,

this sense of being trapped and unable to move, unable to enter into the natural world and go outside

and be in the storm.

But this is a very characteristic poem for Emily Bronte for a couple of reasons.

You'll find several things in this poem that you'll see throughout her canon.

One is the sense of nature conspiring to both participate in and create a mood within a person,

within, in this case, the narrator. The natural world is also in a moody, brooding place,

...