Sometimes, a single line in a poem will sink into my imagination like a hook and stay there until pay it the attention that it deserves.

The line may not be the one the poet would have picked, it may not even be key to the poem’s meaning, but it’s a line that tugs at something related to my thoughts and feelings.

This happened to me when I read ‘Spellbound‘ by Emily Brontë. It was the last line that hooked me. Here’s the poem:

Although the images in the poem are dramatic, Gothic even, it was the refrain that drew my eye. I kept thinking about how it changes from stanza to stanza, as the threat from the oncoming storm increases, from “And I cannot, cannot go.” to “And yet I cannot go.” to “I will not, cannot go.”

It was the “I will not” that I kept coming back to.

I read it as meaning that the poet is choosing to remain spellbound despite the possibly disastrous consequences.

Who does that?

Well, I suspect that many of us do, even if we don’t let ourselves know it, but I knew that I couldn’t pull this poem’s barb from the flesh of my imagination by escaping into generalities. I needed to work out what the last line was drawing my attention to in my life.

The past few weeks have been darker than usual, not just because the nights are long and the days are cloud-laden and cold but because things small and large have been whittling at my sense of well-being until the two most frequent feelings in my day are rage and helplessness and despair seems a few steps away.

I think about the ways in which the world is worsening, about how my country is growing less kind as it becomes less wealthy, about how age is like a constant wind eroding the sandstone of my health, about how scant my connections with people are and how easily solitude could become isolation. These are my:
“Clouds beyond clouds above me, / Wastes beyond wastes below;”

Which is why that last line, “I will not, cannot go.” hooked me.

At the start of the poem, when the refrain is, “I cannot, cannot go.” it seems to me that the storm looks overwhelming and inescapable and being spellbound to stand in its course is an act of tyranny. Yet, by the last line, although the storm is still coming and the poet still cannot go, tyranny has been supplanted by choice.

How does this translate to my life? Well, that depends on the nature of the spell. In my reading of the poem, it is life that is holding me spellbound. I’m here and the storm is coming and I cannot, cannot go.

What I take from this poem is that I shouldn’t see life as tyranny. Yes, the storm is coming and I can’t avoid it but that’s life and I choose to live, to weather the storm, to refuse to be made to go. It is my will to stand in this place and with the people that I love and let the storm be damned.

At least, that’s what I tell myself on a good day, buoyed up by the words of a dead poet who never got to see her thirty-first birthday.