The latest in a semi-regular series that breaks down a poem to analyse what it’s really trying to tell us.

Only recently we lost Vincent O’Sullivan, who is remembered fondly and passionately by many people on The Spinoff here, and by Emma Neale, here. O’Sullivan’s final collection of poetry was released only weeks after his death. Still Is (Te Herenga Waka University Press) is a remarkable adventure through the mind of a curious, energetic and exceptionally erudite person.

‘Faith has made me whole’ stood out for me because it reflects on the shifts between childhood beliefs and adult ones. Something moved me about that, given how final this collection is. It’s also a fun poem because it explores visual mediums (the paintings of Goya, and illustrations in children’s books) and shows the mind of a person at work on a specific subject: the witch.

Faith has made me whole by Vincent O’Sullivan

A witch zooms out of the pages of a children’s story.
She’s astride a broom trailing knotty twigs.
Birch, you can bet on that. They love flying Birches.
When I read through about familiars I went off liking
cats. “Succubus” was too tricky a word
and in any case it sounded rude. When I grew
up and saw drawings by Goya I was sorry
I ever said “I don’t believe in witches”. Santa
Clauses never come back but white-limbed birches
prove forever about witches, flecked across the moon.

Reading notes:

A witch zooms out of the pages of a children’s story.

Witches in children’s stories are so evocative. Like Mahy’s witch in The Boy with Two Shadows. You want her to be real but also you don’t because she can be scary and unsettling. In this poem she’s travelling off the page beyond the story … but where to?

If we think of this first line in collaboration with the title (“Faith has made me whole”) there’s already something big happening: faith and belief, and children, and stories and witches. Children are natural believers: they can make anything true. Children’s stories revel in that kind of open-hearted faith and throw all manner of creature and truth at it. So is this first line a gesture toward ideas of belief? When a child reads a story about a witch, does their faith in stories make them real (and enable the witch to travel beyond the page and into the live space of the imagination)? 

She’s astride a broom trailing knotty twigs.

The classic witch, then. “Trailing knotty twigs” is exactly what we might conjure from the idea of an illustration of a witch from a children’s story. There’s some comfort here, in a way. This collective visual understanding: the symbol of the broomstick is so widely understood.

Birch, you can bet on that. They love flying Birches.

Here we have a deepening of that familiar image with a spot of tree lore. Birch trees are loaded with symbolism and folklore. This website outlines a lot of it and says how the birch provided the archetypal witch’s broomstick. So this is the narrator bringing their own knowledge to meet the poem: infusing this image of the witch with the detail of birch. But it’s also an assumption and a stereotype: “They love flying Birches” is a sweeping statement that lumps all witches into the same pot. There’s something naive about this which fits with the idea of storybook version of a witch.

When I read through about familiars I went off liking
cats. “Succubus” was too tricky a word
and in any case it sounded rude.

In the middle ages, “witches” (women) were accused of having extra teats designed for the express purpose of suckling their familiars, often cats, who were deployed to perform dastardly magics. Any harmless skin tag or scar or mole was proof enough to inquisitors and their violent methods. In this part of the poem, the narrator is queasy about the concept of familiars: enough to put them off cats. It’s quite a natural leap to go from the concept of extra suckling teats to the concept of the “Succubus”, which is another figure from folklore and refers to a (female) demon or witch that seduces men so they can eat their semen, the preferred food group of the succubus.

But what is “tricky” about the word? The misogyny? The fear of the female body? Like the witch, the succubus has a long and fascinating history, including the story of Lilith who was the wife of Adam and who had sex with an angel. It’s tricky to unpack a single word when they can be so loaded with stories. But very quickly after this “tricky” moment the narrator dismisses complexity with the more banal “And in any case it sounded rude.” Which is not untrue. Succubus has a juicy quality. You want to hiss the word through plump, moist lips. 

When I grew
up and saw drawings by Goya I was sorry
I ever said “I don’t believe in witches”.

Francisco Goya was an 18th Century Spanish painter who created the most wild depictions of witches. The Witches Sabbath (1798) shows a mad-eyed ram-goat creature (Satan) wearing a wreath and surrounded by women wearing flimsy, romantic dresses and haggard, gnarled faces. Some of the women are holding children up to the mad-eyed ram-goat, as if pleading for it to save or eat them. One of the children is skeletal. In the sky there’s a glowing half moon and bats swooping in. Haunting! Grotesque yet kind of pretty?

Witches Flight (1797) is even madder. Hovering mid-frame is a contortion of witches seemingly lifted to the sky by their heads which are oddly dressed in conical hats. Underneath them is a figure walking, stooped, holding a sheet over their head. There’s a white horse sneaking into frame. The sea rocks and rollicks in the background. Witches’ Sabbath (1821-23) is quite awful. There’s a crowd of witches, much bigger than any other painting before, all staring goggle-eyed at the ram-goat Satan which is eye-rolling back at them. The colours all ochres and blacks and browns. The eyes are pin pricks of white, often wonkily drawn. It’s all unrest: there’s a sense of violence about to break out. 

We’re now very far away from the children’s book image of a witch. Goya’s witches are nightmares. The line “I don’t believe in witches” is reminiscent of the line in Peter Pan, “I don’t believe in fairies”. In that book, the story goes that every time a child says “I don’t believe in fairies” a fairy drops down dead. So we could translate that idea into this poem: the narrator has a new appreciation of witches thanks to Goya’s stupendous images and regrets dismissing them. The idea of the witch has been made more real thanks to the paintings. Though there is a sinister tone here: you would not want to invoke the displeasure of a Goya witch. The narrator’s regret is perhaps related more strongly to the art itself: youthful dismissal has been replaced by fine art appreciation. The grown up can see the value in Goya’s eerily lifelike creations: how magnificent they are, how affecting. 

Santa / Clauses never come back but white-limbed birches
Prove forever about witches, flecked across the moon.

Shiver, shiver, up the spine. These last few lines bring the child beliefs and the adult ones into some kind of reconciliation. Santa Clauses don’t return in any meaningful way once that childhood belief is busted (I like the way Santa Clause is literally broken by the line break here). But witches live and morph through stories and through art: the grotesque history and all the paintings and books and the children’s stories that came after. The story-book witch might be easily dismissed as a cosy fiction, but the witches that Goya shows us, the ones carried by the worst of the stories, those witches haunt the adult mind. Not in a childish way, but in the way that once seen, they’re hard to unsee. Birch trees, for this narrator, will always remind him of the veracity of the witch’s broomstick which is now a symbol for the power of art. That final image “flecked across the moon” is at once classic (the silhouette of the witch on a broomstick flying against the full moon) and renewed through the shifts in the poem.

The tone of this poem is light. There’s a sense of gentle reflection and humour in the lines. And that tone is at play with the title of the poem which kind of tricks us into think we’re in for something grand and heavy about religion (the word “faith” and its religious connotations). In the end, this is a portrait of a person thinking about symbols that carry through from childhood and into adulthood, and how those symbols shift and morph according to what we see, how we think, and what informs our perceptions.

Still Is (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30) is available from Unity Books.