Poem of the Week: 'Spellbound'

A winter's poem for a winter's weekend, this was written by Emily Bronte, the most enigmatic of the Bronte sisters (and author of the extraordinary Wuthering Heights). Living in Haworth, on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, Bronte spent many a day wandering the barren wilderness on her doorstep, whatever the season.

This is a poem about the power of nature; but it is also about the way she is attracted by nature at its most wild and dangerous. A wintry night on the moors should, by rights, send her back home to a nice warm fire; but, instead, she is mesmerised by the magic and beauty of the moors in winter. So powerful is the scene in which she finds herself, in fact, that she is almost in a trance:

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.

Recommended Reading: The Virgin Suicides

Sofia Coppola (director of Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, and daughter of The Godfather's Francis Ford Coppola) first came to Hollywood fame with her movie version of The Virgin Suicides by Christopher Eugenides. It is a hypnotic, beautiful book which tells the story of the tragic lives of the Lisbon sisters, each of whom kills herself as a way out of the torment of adolescence.

Haunting and tender, with brilliant flashes of humour, The Virgin Suicides is the story of the disintegration of a captivating American family in 1970s suburban Michigan. The five Lisbon sisters are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who, twenty years on, recall their adolescence: the sisters' gauche but breathtaking appearance on the night of the homecoming dance; the brassière belonging to the beautiful, promiscuous Lux, draped over a crucifix on the wall; the records the boys played down the phone, trying desperately to penetrate the sisters' isolation; and the sultry, sleepy street across which they watched fragile lives disappear...

Here is a brief extract from the novel:

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide - it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese - the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, "This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go." He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.

Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquillity that they had stood mesmerized.

But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon's razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. She didn't say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.

Recommended Reading: The Cement Garden

In The Cement Garden, the father of four children dies. His death is followed by the death of the children's mother. In order to avoid being taken into custody, the children hide their mother's death from the outside world by encasing her corpse in cement in their basement. Two of the siblings, a teenage boy and girl, descend into an incestuous relationship, while the younger son starts to experiment with transvestism.

Little wonder, therefore, that Ian McEwan's first novel caused such a stir when it was published in 1978. Back then, maybe British society was still clinging on to the idea that adolescence was a tidy and simple thing; nowadays, we know that it is anything but - but I would still defy you not to be a little unsettled by the events which unfurl in the pages of this novel. There is also an excellent (but equally unsettling) 1993 movie of the book. Here is a brief extract from the book itself:

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed. My sisters and I talked about him the week after he died, and Sue certainly cried when the ambulance men tucked him up in a bright red blanket and carried him away. He was a frail, irascible, obsessive man with yellowish hands and face. I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.

In the early summer of my fourteenth year a lorry pulled up outside our house. I was sitting on the front step rereading a comic. The driver and another man came toward me. They were covered in a fine, pale dust which gave their faces a ghostly look. They were both whistling shrilly completely different tunes. I stood up and held the comic out of sight. I wished I had been reading the racing page of my father’s paper or the football results.

“Cement?” one of them said.

Poem of the Week: 'The Way Things Are'

Friend of The Beatles back in the 1960s; recent regular on the Stephen Fry panel show 'QI'; and writer of some of the most accessible and yet profound poetry of the past 30 years - liverpudlian Roger McGough wrote this poem in 1999, and it stands as a collection of advice to a child about the strange world in which we all grow up...

The Way Things Are
by Roger McGough

No, the candle is not crying, it cannot feel pain.
Even telescopes, like the rest of us, grow bored.
Bubblegum will not make the hair soft and shiny.
The duller the imagination, the faster the car,
I am your father and this is the way things are.

When the sky is looking the other way,
do not enter the forest. No, the wind
is not caused by the rushing of clouds.
An excuse is as good a reason as any.
A lighthouse, launched, will not go far,
I am your father and this is the way things are.

No, old people do not walk slowly
because they have plenty of time.
Gardening books when buried will not flower.
Though lightly worn, a crown may leave a scar,
I am your father and this is the way things are.

No, the red woolly hat has not been
put on the railing to keep it warm.
When one glove is missing, both are lost.
Today's craft fair is tomorrow's car boot sale.
The guitarist gently weeps, not the guitar,
I am your father and this is the way things are.

Pebbles work best without batteries.
The deckchair will fail as a unit of currency.
Even though your shadow is shortening
it does not mean you are growing smaller.
Moonbeams sadly, will not survive in a jar,
I am your father and this is the way things are.

For centuries the bullet remained quietly confident
that the gun would be invented.
A drowning surrealist will not appreciate
the concrete lifebelt.
No guarantee my last goodbye is au revoir,
I am your father and this is the way things are.

Do not become a prison-officer unless you know
what you're letting someone else in for.
The thrill of being a shower curtain will soon pall.
No trusting hand awaits the falling star.
I am your father, and I am sorry,
but this is the way things are.

Books for Christmas!

Don't know what to put in your letter to Santa? Tired of your parents asking you what they should spend all their money on for your Christmas present this year? Stuck for what to suggest to all your friends who desperately want to buy you lots of presents too? Look no further...

Click below and have a look at some of these lists of essential reads, and see if there is anything here that might capture your imagination.

Top 10 books about the darker side of Adolescence...
Top 10 Adult books for Teenagers...
Top 10 characters from children's historical fiction...
Top 10 books for Teens...
Top 10 books to feed the imagination...
Michael Morpurgo's Top 10 favourite books... (Michael Morpurgo is the Children's Laureate)
Eoin Colfer's Top 10 children's books...

And, once you've read any of these, please feel free to recommend the best ones to the other readers of this blog. :)

Poem of the Week: 'I'm nobody! Who are you?'

Emily Dickinson was an American poet writing in the 1800s. She felt like a pariah from the religious, conservative society in which she lived, and rebelled against it through the poetry she wrote - poetry which was only published posthumously (i.e. after her death). She wrote it in order to 'survive' and make sense of the strange, cruel, pointless world she often saw before her.

In this poem, she explores the pressure society puts on all of us to fit in and be like everybody else - but, unsurprisingly, she is unwilling to do so. There is an excellent webpage explaining this whole poem in detail and depth here. Click here to find out more about Dickinson's life and to read some more of her poetry. Here is the poem:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Recommended Reading: Dracula

Dracula by Bram Stoker

You all know the myth; maybe some of you have seen the films; but do you dare read the book that started it all???

When I was a student at Oxford University, I spent my first year living in my college, and I had a very old room right in the corner beside the spooky, gothic chapel. I read Dracula as part of the Victorian Literature module of my degree, and I could not put the book down. One warm night, I slept with all my windows wide open, and, in the middle of the night, a quick, haunting howl of wind shot in throw one window and out the other, and I woke instantly at the noise of the wind and then the simultaneous crash as the windows slammed shut. I was absolutely terrified, and I blame this book.

Here is an extract. I am considering reading the whole book with the BOOK GROUP in the near future:

Last night the Count left me early, and locked himself into his own room. As soon as I dared, I ran up the winding stair, and looked out of the window, which opened South. I thought I would watch for the Count, for there is something going on. The Szgany are quartered somewhere in the castle and are doing work of some kind. I know it, for now and then, I hear a far-away muffled sound as of mattock and spade, and, whatever it is, it must be the end of some ruthless villainy.

I had been at the window somewhat less than half an hour, when I saw something coming out of the Count's window. I drew back and watched carefully, and saw the whole man emerge. It was a new shock to me to find that he had on the suit of clothes which I had worn whilst travelling here, and slung over his shoulder the terrible bag which I had seen the women take away. There could be no doubt as to his quest, and in my garb, too! This, then, is his new scheme of evil, that he will allow others to see me, as they think, so that he may both leave evidence that I have been seen in the towns or villages posting my own letters, and that any wickedness which he may do shall by the local people be attributed to me.

It makes me rage to think that this can go on, and whilst I am shut up here, a veritable prisoner, but without that protection of the law which is even a criminal's right and consolation.

I thought I would watch for the Count's return, and for a long time sat doggedly at the window. Then I began to notice that there were some quaint little specks floating in the rays of the moonlight. They were like the tiniest grains of dust, and they whirled round and gathered in clusters in a nebulous sort of way. I watched them with a sense of soothing, and a sort of calm stole over me. I leaned back in the embrasure in a more comfortable position, so that I could enjoy more fully the aerial gambolling.

Something made me start up, a low, piteous howling of dogs somewhere far below in the valley, which was hidden from my sight. Louder it seemed to ring in my ears, and the floating moats of dust to take new shapes to the sound as they danced in the moonlight. I felt myself struggling to awake to some call of my instincts. Nay, my very soul was struggling, and my half-remembered sensibilities were striving to answer the call. I was becoming hypnotised!

Quicker and quicker danced the dust. The moonbeams seemed to quiver as they went by me into the mass of gloom beyond. More and more they gathered till they seemed to take dim phantom shapes. And then I started, broad awake and in full possession of my senses, and ran screaming from the place.

The phantom shapes, which were becoming gradually materialised from the moonbeams, were those three ghostly women to whom I was doomed.

I fled, and felt somewhat safer in my own room, where there was no moonlight, and where the lamp was burning brightly.

When a couple of hours had passed I heard something stirring in the Count's room, something like a sharp wail quickly suppressed. And then there was silence, deep, awful silence, which chilled me. With a beating heart, I tried the door, but I was locked in my prison, and could do nothing. I sat down and simply cried.

As I sat I heard a sound in the courtyard without, the agonised cry of a woman. I rushed to the window, and throwing it up, peered between the bars.

There, indeed, was a woman with dishevelled hair, holding her hands over her heart as one distressed with running. She was leaning against the corner of the gateway. When she saw my face at the window she threw herself forward, and shouted in a voice laden with menace, "Monster, give me my child!"

She threw herself on her knees, and raising up her hands, cried the same words in tones which wrung my heart. Then she tore her hair and beat her breast, and abandoned herself to all the violences of extravagant emotion. Finally, she threw herself forward, and though I could not see her, I could hear the beating of her naked hands against the door.

Somewhere high overhead, probably on the tower, I heard the voice of the Count calling in his harsh, metallic whisper. His call seemed to be answered from far and wide by the howling of wolves. Before many minutes had passed a pack of them poured, like a pent-up dam when liberated, through the wide entrance into the courtyard.

There was no cry from the woman, and the howling of the wolves was but short. Before long they streamed away singly, licking their lips.

I could not pity her, for I knew now what had become of her child, and she was better dead.

What shall I do? What can I do? How can I escape from this dreadful thing of night, gloom, and fear?

Riddle 2

The only Riddles I'll put up are from the Redwall Series. Here's an easy one:

My first is third, like the sound of the sea,
My second's the centre of you, not me,
My third is the end of him but not you,
My fourth starts a picture, not a view,
My fifth is in bean though not in been,
My sixth and seventh starts seldom seen.
Sunrise and sunset, warmth and cold,
Put them together and a sign will unfold.

It's easy, right?