Canadian poet Louise Morey Bowman wrote “The Witch” in the early twentieth century, as modernism was beginning to test old moral and stylistic boundaries. Born in 1882, Bowman belonged to a generation of women writers whose independence was often treated as hysteria or witchcraft. The poem enters that climate of suspicion and turns it into an unlikely song of escape.
The story is simple on its surface. A woman lives above a valley wood, singing from a hill-top where long grass waves and a smooth gray stone holds her tally. The “good people” hear her music from below and enjoy it, until one day she sings something “mad and bad and much too gay.” They climb the hill, inspect her stone, and decide that its “strange magic things” prove she is “queer ... mad queer.” They drag her away, she fights until she lies half-dead, and eventually they bury her on the hill with the stone as a tombstone. But the final stanza reverses that burial. She laughs, leaves her “dead white brow” behind, and roams through wood and valley singing, “I am free! I am free! I am free!” The central idea is not simply persecution; it is the failure of a community to silence a woman’s vision. What they misread as madness turns out to be the very source of her freedom.
The poem’s construction has the pulse of a folk ballad, yet it keeps breaking loose. The villagers’ speech is full of clinching rhyme and gossipy repetition: “Look here! Look here! / Oh it’s very very plain she is queer ... mad queer!” Those lines sound like a verdict being hammered into place. The poem’s own rhyme, however, is looser: “tally” half-rhymes with “valley,” and “wood” sits uneasily against “should,” so the sound never quite obeys the villagers’ moral neatness. The rhythm shifts between narrative and the woman’s final first-person chant. The repeated word “free” is both an escape and a formal release from the tight, scolding music of the “good people.”
Imagery separates the valley of social approval from the hill-top of imaginative life. The wood is “wild, singing,” while the hill-top has grass waving long and a stone used for a tally of “years and days.” Yet the tally is not a calendar; it records “strange magic things” such as the parenthetical cry “O the deep blue wings!” Those wings return in the final stanza as “wild blue wings,” linking the woman’s art to flight and desire. Blue, the poem’s most vital color, belongs not to the village but to the air and to the wings she finally claims. Even the image of her “soft black hair / Strained back from her dead white brow” shows the villagers tidying her into a proper death, only for her laughter to spring out of the grave. The stone, meant to mark her madness, becomes the thing “they gave back” to her in freedom.
What makes “The Witch” significant is its refusal of tragedy. The woman does not merely endure or haunt; she claims the entire landscape. “Now I own the singing wood and the wood owns me,” she sings, so the hill-top, valley, and stone all belong to her renewed voice. In an era when unconventional women were often pathologized, Bowman reimagines the witch as an artist whose song outlives the people who tried to bury it. The poem celebrates a wild, singing self that no tombstone can hold.