fee-fi-fo-fum, fee fi-fo-fum

The owl hooted on the oak,

The crow cried in the dark;

Dogs howled on the hills,

Cats purred in the bushes;

The Night was ripe and ready.

 

Fee-fi-fo-fum, Fee-fi-fo-fum,

The Three Witches began to hum

Standing in the grim gray garbs

With the gray eyes glaring in silence

They were ready to tell his destiny.

 

“Scotland, the jewel of thy crown,

The sword calls for thy title to own,

The blood is thy sacred power,

As it runs redder and deeper.”

Thus, the prophecy of his fate’s cast in

 Fee-fi-fo-fum, Fee-fi-fo-fum, Fee-fi-fo-fum!

 

P.S.: This week’s #FairyTuesday theme on Twitter liberally encompasses witches, ghosts, and other supernatural beings, so my choice is the Graeae, the Three Sisters personifying the Fate of Man in the ancient Greek mythology. They had only one eye and a tooth to share, but the pre-Herculean Mycenan hero Perseus intercepted the eye when the Sisters fumbled with it in the air and forced them to answer the whereabouts of Medusa. They ultimately relented to the demand, whereupon Perseus set about killing Medusa. 

This image of the Three Sisters is then also wondrously associated with the Three Witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth by the sheer dint of the somber, dismal greyness of the three uncanny women. But as Mcbeth was a tragic figure consumed by guilt and greed, so were the Three Witches, malevolent and dystopian, vis a vis the somewhat faltering and fumbling Grey Sisters menaced by Perseus bullying them to elicit what he wanted to know. 

This poem, however, is more of Macbeth’s Three Witches leading him to perdition because the grim image of the witches conjured up by Shakespeare is terrifically atmospheric and dismally spell-bounding without the pageantry of words and expressions.