Timber Wolf Xmas Cards

“Wen” is my own free translation of an Anglo-Saxon charm—an ancient medical prescription designed to rid the body of warts. You don’t need tablets from the chemist for a fine complexion, just the magic of powerful words. This charm keeps company with a range of other Old English texts: there are charms for a sudden stitch, for delayed birth, for the theft of cattle, for journeys, for a swarm of bees.

Poetry still operates on the rather primitive assumption that language—especially when stylised and cadenced and repetitive—can intervene magically in the real world. You can see it in some of the great Romantic poems, like Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, which is probably the greatest (and longest) piece of magical incantation in English. And ideas of magic survive in the notion that poets are somehow inspired it—intoning rhythmically—as if declaiming a spell, as if some other voice is speaking through him, as if the words of the poem are somehow coming into being at the moment of utterance.