That old black magic has me in its spell,
That old black magic that you weave so well.
Those icy fingers up and down my spine,
The same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine.

These lines are the opening of the popular American standard “That Old Black Magic,” with lyrics by Johnny Mercer and music by Harold Arlen. The song was written for the 1942 Paramount film musical *Star Spangled Rhythm* and quickly took on a life beyond the movie, becoming a widely recorded jazz and pop number during the big-band era and after. Mercer’s lyric draws on a playful vocabulary of spells, witchcraft, and bodily sensation to describe romantic infatuation as an irresistible, almost supernatural force—an approach well-suited to the era’s taste for witty, metaphor-rich love songs and Arlen’s blues-tinged melodic style.

The speaker frames attraction as “old black magic,” suggesting a familiar, recurring pattern of being captivated despite oneself. The “spell” and “witchcraft” metaphors convey both pleasure and loss of control: desire arrives as something done to the speaker, not chosen. Physical imagery (“icy fingers up and down my spine”) translates emotional overwhelm into a visceral reaction, while “when your eyes meet mine” pinpoints the trigger—an exchanged glance that reactivates the enchantment. The lyric’s charm lies in its ambivalence: the magic is dangerous and chilling, yet also seductive, implying that the speaker is complicit in returning to the same bewitchment.