Ernest Dowson

The Three Witches

By ERNEST DOWSON
(Reprint)
All the moon-shed nights are over,
And the days of gray and dun;
There is neither may nor clover,
And the day and night are one.

Refrain variation

The parenthetical version of the earlier refrain—the hamlet/city line now feels like an aside, a weakening echo of itself.

Not an hamlet, not a city
Meets our strained and tearless eyes;
In the plain without a pity,
Where the wan grass droops and dies.
We shall wander through the meaning
Of a day and see no light,
For our lichened arms are leaning

Lichened arms

Lichen grows on dead or dying things over long periods. These witches aren't just old—they're fossilized, more stone than flesh.

On the ends of endless night.

Astarte reference

Ancient Phoenician goddess of fertility and sexuality—calling themselves her "children" and "abortions" suggests failed creation, sterility instead of life.

We, the children of Astarte,
Dear abortions of the moon,
In a gay and silent party,
We are riding to you soon.
Burning ramparts, ever burning!

Burning ramparts

Ramparts are fortress walls. The eternal flame they're riding toward suggests hell, but they're "yearning" for it—damnation as destination.

To the flame which never dies
We are yearning, yearning, yearning,

Gay and tearless

"Gay" here means cheerful, not sexual. The paradox: they're joyful but can't cry, yearning but emotionally dead—a very Decadent combination.

With our gay and tearless eyes.
In the plain without a pity,
(Not an hamlet, not a city)

Refrain variation

The parenthetical version of the earlier refrain—the hamlet/city line now feels like an aside, a weakening echo of itself.

Where the wan grass droops and dies.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Decadent Sterility

Dowson published this in the 1890s, the height of British Decadence, and it reads like a manifesto of exhaustion. The poem's landscape is post-fertile—"neither may nor clover," grass that "droops and dies." Even time has collapsed: "day and night are one." This isn't just darkness; it's the absence of distinction itself.

The witches call themselves "Dear abortions of the moon," a shocking phrase that encapsulates Decadent aesthetics. They're failed births, creatures that didn't fully come into being. Astarte was a fertility goddess, which makes the irony cut deeper—her children are sterile, tearless, unable to complete the cycle of life and death. They're stuck in an eternal middle state, "leaning / On the ends of endless night."

The "gay and silent party" riding toward eternal flames captures Decadence's core paradox: cheerful damnation, elegant decay. They're not tortured by their fate—they're "yearning, yearning, yearning" for it. The triple repetition suggests desire without consummation, another kind of sterility. This is very much Dowson's territory: he spent his short life (dead at 32) writing about impossible loves and beautiful failures.

The Refrain's Collapse

The poem uses a modified villanelle structure—not strict, but built around repeating refrains that slowly degrade. "In the plain without a pity" appears three times, but notice what happens to its companion line. First it's "Not an hamlet, not a city," then it returns identically, then finally it appears in parentheses: "(Not an hamlet, not a city)." The parenthetical version reads like an afterthought, a weakened echo.

This formal decay mirrors the content. The refrains are supposed to provide structure, stability—but here they're drooping like the wan grass. Even the poem's architecture is exhausted. The "plain without a pity" isn't just pitiless; it's a landscape where pity itself cannot exist, where the emotional range has narrowed to "gay and tearless."

The final stanza collapses into the refrain entirely, as if the poem has given up trying to say anything new. It just repeats the landscape of sterility one more time. This is form as content: the poem enacting its own exhaustion, its own failure to regenerate.