This thread discusses the Content article: Poetry Month

from The Witches Charms

1 Charm
Dame, dame! the watch is set:
Quickly come, we all are met.
From the lakes and from the fens,
From the rocks and from the dens,
From the woods and from the caves, From the churchyards, from the graves,
That they die on, here are we!

Comes she not yet?
Strike another heat!

2 Charm.
The weather is fair, the wind is good:
Up, dame, o' your horse of wood!
Or else tuck up your gray frock,
And saddle your goat or your green cock,
And make his bridle a bottom of thrid
To roll up how many miles you have rid.
Quickly come away,
For we all stay.

Nor yet? nay then
We'll try her again.

3 Charm.
The owl is abroad, the bat and the toad,
And so is the cat-a-mountain;
The ant and the mole sit both in a hole,
And the frog peep out o' the fountain.
The dogs they do bay, and the timbrels play,
The spindle is not a-turning;
The moon is red, and the stars are fled,
But all the sky is a-burning.

- Ben Jonson

I've had Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" on my mind all this month. Everyone seems to adore "The Road Not Taken," but I'm a much bigger fan of "Mending Wall."

I agree with Frost that we all need to think about exactly what we're walling in and walling out, because tradition is not always reason enough. Nature has its wisdom and should not be ignored.

Since the poem is in the public domain, I thought I'd post it here:

Mending Wall
by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

That book is good
Which puts me in a working mood.
Unless to Thought be added Will
Apollo is an imbecile.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson