Emily Brontë (1818–1848), novelist, author of “Wuthering Heights,” was the second youngest of the famous literary siblings in the parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire. She survives in the reminiscences of her older sister, Charlotte, as a reclusive figure, “not naturally gregarious,” withdrawn into fantasy worlds, so feverishly in love with the Yorkshire moors that she suffered crippling homesickness when away from them.

Today’s Poem of the Day, “Spellbound,” hints at this intensity of feeling for the wind-scoured harshness of the natural world that surrounded her. In simple tetrameter abab quatrains, Brontë (writing under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”) invokes the destructive enchantment of the northern winter. The storm descends, yet its beholder, caught like a person in a nightmare, is powerless to flee it — or to want to.

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

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.