Poetry Friday 20

It's not Halloween for a couple more weeks, but one way and another it's been a witchy week: I've just re-read the first two Tiffany Aching books by Terry Pratchett in order to review the whole series, and I read Marcus Sedgwick's Witch Hill and Margaret Mahy's The Changeover earlier this week, so I thought I'd offer you the "Witches' Chant" from Shakespeare's Macbeth (it also serves as another reminder (see below !) for the Halloween Carnival of Children's Literature that I'll be hosting) at the end of the month.

Witches' Chant

Round about the cauldron go:
In the poisones entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Sweated venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first in the charmed pot.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blindworm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing.
For charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witch's mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd in the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat; and slips of yew
silver'd in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by the drab, -
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For ingredients of our cauldron.
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.