Magic
Spell, charm, incantation: write the theme poetry was born inside.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about magic: spell imagery, incantation techniques, cliches to avoid, plus exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
Magic is not a subject poetry visits; it is the house poetry grew up in. The Latin carmen meant both song and spell, 'charm' descends from it, and the oldest verses we possess are incantations: words arranged to heal wounds, bind lovers, bring rain. A poem about magic is therefore always slightly recursive, language about the power of language, and the poet's advantage is that the reader already half-believes. Everyone has repeated a name in the dark, touched wood, whispered a wish over candles. The instinct never left; poems just give it better lines.
As a theme, magic splits into two workable registers. There is staged magic, spells, witches, transformations, potions, which offers costume and plot; and there is ambient magic, the conviction that the world is quietly enchanted, that words and objects have powers commerce cannot see. The first tempts cliche; the second tempts vagueness. The best poems borrow the machinery of the first and the faith of the second.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose magic because it lets them tell the truth slant about desire and power. A love spell is a poem about wanting written in the imperative mood; a curse is grief with its teeth showing; a charm against forgetting is an elegy that refuses to concede. The spell form gives inadmissible feelings a legal costume. It also reconnects a poet with sound, since a spell that does not chant is just a shopping list, and rediscovering rhythm and repetition through this theme improves everything else you write.
Judges notice it too: an entry built as a genuine incantation, with sound doing half the work, tends to stand out in a stack of free verse, whatever the scoresheet measures.
Where it comes from
The Anglo-Saxon metrical charms, against a sudden stitch, for unfruitful land, are among the oldest poems in English, and they are frankly spells. Shakespeare gave stage magic its two poles: the witches' trochaic chant in Macbeth, deliberately unlike the play's human blank verse, and Prospero in The Tempest drowning his book, the artist renouncing power. W. B. Yeats, a practising occultist, filled early poems like 'The Song of Wandering Aengus' with fire in the head, silver apples, a glimmering girl: enchantment as longing that lasts a lifetime.
The thread never broke. From folk charms and lullabies, which are domestic spells against harm, to modern poets reclaiming the witch as a figure of female power, magic has remained the theme through which poetry remembers what it was for.
The elements that carry it
- Ingredients and lists: the gathered herbs, the named bones, the recipe structure that makes a spell feel procedural and real.
- Names and naming: the oldest magical act; to know the true name is to have power, and poems can enact this by withholding or revealing one.
- Thresholds and hours: midnight, crossroads, doorways, the new moon, magic's preferred coordinates in time and space.
- Repetition and number: things said three times, three knots, nine herbs; ritual counting that structures the verse itself.
- Household objects gone strange: salt, iron, mirrors, knotted thread, the domestic world revealed as an armoury of charms.
Techniques that work
- Write in the imperative and future tenses of the spell: 'take', 'bind', 'let', 'may', a grammar of command that gives any subject ritual force.
- Change the metre for enchanted speech, as Shakespeare did: a chant in falling rhythm inside a free-verse poem marks the magic acoustically.
- Use the recipe form: numbered ingredients and instructions for an impossible outcome, to unforget a grandmother, to return a lost year.
- Build with threes and refrains: repetition is the spell's engine, and each return of the line should tighten, not merely repeat.
- Anchor every enchantment in one mundane object, a bus pass, a kitchen knife, a phone that still holds a dead friend's messages; magic needs a handle.
Mistakes to avoid
- Renting the costume box: wands, cauldrons, pointy hats with no personal stake. Fix: ask what your speaker would actually risk a spell for, and write that.
- Incantation without sound: a spell in flat prose rhythm. Fix: read aloud and revise until the lines chant; repetition, stress and rhyme are the theme's tools.
- Vague 'everything is magical' mysticism. Fix: locate the enchantment in one object, hour or word, and prove it through precise detail.
- Forgetting the price. Fix: in every tradition magic costs something; a spell with no cost has no stakes, so show what the speaker trades.
An exercise
Write a spell for something magic cannot do: mending a friendship, unsaying a sentence, keeping a parent's memory intact. Use strict recipe form, five ingredients, four instructions, one warning, and make every ingredient an object from your real life.
A challenge
Write a poem in two voices: a human speaking in ordinary free verse, and an enchantment answering in a chanted, repeating metre. Let the reader hear the boundary between the two worlds without a single stage direction.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about the last practising charm-keeper in a family, the one who still knows which words to say over a fever, teaching the words to a sceptical grandchild who is secretly memorising every one.
Before you submit
- The poem uses at least one genuine spell device: imperative grammar, refrain, counting or naming.
- Sound patterns are audible and intentional when read aloud.
- One mundane, personal object grounds the enchantment.
- The magic has a price that the poem shows or implies.
- The desire behind the spell is human and specific, not generic wonder.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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