Spellbound 1
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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.
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Spellbound 1
- 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.