Witches
Write the woman at the edge of the village: feared, needed, and finally given her say.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about witches: spells, persona and reclamation, plus craft techniques, exercises and prompts in this free Writory guide for every poet.
What this theme is
Strip away the pointed hat and the witch is one of poetry's most serious subjects: a figure for unsanctioned power and the price of it. Historically she was the healer, the midwife, the widow with property, the woman who knew things, and communities that needed her also feared her, then burned her when crops failed. Witch poems are almost never really about magic. They are about blame, about who gets called monstrous for living outside the pattern, and about what it costs to be useful and unforgiven at the same time.
The theme offers two great registers. The first is the spell itself: incantation, charm, curse, the oldest job poetry ever had, with its drumming stresses and lists of ingredients. The second is testimony: the trial record, the confession under duress, the neighbour's accusation, the witch's own account at last. A single poem can move between the two, and the friction between chant and evidence is often where the power sits.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose witches when they want to write about power, gender and scapegoating without a lecture in sight; the figure carries the argument for them. The spell form also hands over a complete sonic toolkit, imperatives, repetition, incantatory rhythm, that most themes never get to use. And persona work here is irresistible: the witch has been described by everyone except herself for five hundred years, so first person feels like opening a locked room.
Where it comes from
Shakespeare gave English poetry its most famous witches: the weird sisters of Macbeth, chanting in trochaic tetrameter, the metre's front-loaded stresses making every line land like a drumbeat. The ballads had their own witch-women and shape-shifters long before. Then history supplied darker material: the trials at Salem, at Pendle, across early modern Europe, left records of real women, named and hanged, that poets still return to with anger and care.
In 1960 Anne Sexton opened a collection with a poem claiming kinship with the possessed witch, the lonely, misunderstood woman flying over ordinary houses, and made the figure a mask for female experience that society refuses to house. Sylvia Plath pushed witch and martyr imagery to incandescent extremes. Since then, feminist poets have steadily reclaimed the word, writing the witch as ancestor, patron saint of difficult women, and warning.
The elements that carry it
- Herbs, bottles, knots and thread: the domestic inventory that doubles as an apothecary and looks like evidence in the wrong light.
- Familiar creatures, the cat, the hare, the crow, that blur the line between companionship and accusation.
- Fire and water as instruments of trial: the ducking stool, the stake, the swimming test where innocence meant drowning.
- Edges and margins: hedgerows, moors, the last house before the forest, the place on the map where the village's certainty runs out.
- The percussive sound of muttered charms: hard consonants, trochaic rhythm, lists chanted in threes.
Techniques that work
- Write in first-person persona, but decide what your witch wants, revenge, peace, her garden back, her name cleared, not merely what she is; desire drives a persona poem, costume does not.
- Borrow spell grammar: imperatives ('take', 'burn', 'bury'), ingredient lists, and repetition in threes. A recipe with sinister stakes is already half a poem.
- Use trochaic rhythm, stress first, for incantation passages, and hear how the falling beat turns speech into drum; switch to looser rhythm when the woman, not the witch, speaks.
- Write the accuser too. Fear is half of every witch story, and a poem that understands the frightened neighbour is far more unsettling than one that only celebrates the accused.
- End with the witch defining herself, one line in her own terms, after a poem full of other people's definitions.
Mistakes to avoid
- Halloween costume clichés: warts, cackles, broomsticks played for spookiness. Fix by giving her a job, a garden, a grievance and a landlord; the ordinary details make the persecution real.
- Making her all victim or all power. The figure is interesting because she is both feared and dependent, useful and disposable; keep the contradiction.
- Forgetting that the trials killed real people. If you use Salem or Pendle, honour the record's cruelty; borrowed suffering demands accuracy and care.
- Incantation as empty sound: chants that repeat but signify nothing. Every ingredient in your spell should carry meaning the poem cashes in later.
An exercise
Write a spell in strict recipe form, title, ingredients, method, for something no cauldron ever cooked: getting through a custody hearing, surviving a school reunion, making a landlord fix the boiler. Keep the incantatory rhythm; keep the stakes modern.
A challenge
Research one named woman from a historical witch trial, Pendle, Salem, or a case local to you, and write a two-part poem: her neighbour's testimony in the first part, her own unspoken reply in the second. Do not modernise her innocence into blandness; let her be difficult.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in which the 'witch' of a modern street, the woman with too many cats, the one who complains, the one who lives alone and knows everything, finally tells her side over the garden fence.
Before you submit
- The witch has at least three ordinary, human details alongside any magic.
- Any spell or charm passage uses rhythm and repetition deliberately, not decoratively.
- The poem acknowledges the fear or blame that surrounds her, not just her strength.
- Historical references, if used, are treated with accuracy and respect.
- The final lines give her a voice or definition that is her own.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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