This document provides teaching materials for analyzing the poem "Spellbound" by Emily Brontë. It includes discussion questions about the title, setting, characters, and themes presented in each stanza. Background information is provided that the poem was written when Brontë was 19 and refers to an incident from her imaginary world of Gondal where a mother exposes her child to die in winter but cannot look away due to her maternal emotions. Students are prompted to identify phonological techniques like alliteration and assonance used in the poem.

2. SPELLBOUND
LO: To make predictions
about the poem based on the
language choices of the poet.
To analyse the phonological
features of the poem.

3. SPELLBOUND
 What clues might the title give us about the
poem?
 Who might be speaking?
 What might the subject be?

4. FIRST GLANCE
 Highlight/underline all of the words with
negative connotations.
 How many are there?
 What effect does this create?
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/engli
sh_literature/poetryplace/spellboundact.shtml

5. STANZA 1
1. Where do you think the speaker is?
2. What impression do we get of the setting?
3. Who might be the ‘tyrant’?
4. What is the effect of the poet repeating the
word ‘cannot’?

6. STANZA 2
1. What is happening in stanza 2?
2. What technique has the poet used to create a
menacing image of the trees?
3. Why has the poet done this?

7. STANZA 3
1. What is the effect of the repetition in this
stanza?
2. Why do you think the speaker cannot move?

8.  Written in November 1837 when Emily would have
been only 19, this poem is usually attributed to
Emily's 'Gondal' period – Gondal being an imaginary
world created by Emily and her siblings in which
heroes and heroines battled in romantic and
desperate situations. The editor of the Selected
Poems of the Brontës, Juliet Barker, quotes an
earlier authority, Fannie Ratchford (Complete Poems
of Emily Jane Brontë) and suggests that the poem
refers to an incident when one of the heroines
exposes her child to die on the mountains in winter.
Although she cannot bear to watch the child die, the
mother is held by the 'tyrant spell' of maternal
emotions and cannot tear herself away.

9. PHONOLOGY
 Use the sheet to pick out phonological features
from the poem.

10. REVIEW
 Write a S.E.A paragraph analysing the writers
use of alliteration or assonance.