A Poem Is a Ghost Story

Because all poems are a kind of ghost story, spoken by someone who’s not there to someone who thinks they can hear them, or can’t stop hearing them.

When Thomas Hardy’s first wife Emma died in 1912 after 42 years of marriage, most of which was not happy, he wrote a series of poems called quite simply Poems of 1912-13. Some refer to a “her” who has died. Some are addressed by the speaker to a “you” who is a ghost. And some are spoken by the ghost herself. In a poem called “The Haunter,” the ghost laments that she cannot answer the “him" who finally says the things she wished he’d said when she was still alive. In “His Visitor,” she returns to their home to find it all so altered she prefers to “rejoin the roomy silence” of the grave. Between them Hardy placed “The Voice”:

The Voice

by Thomas Hardy 

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

People talk about how poems teach us to see—by which they mean to understand—whatever it is we find ourselves looking at. It’s about becoming more conscious of what we’re taking in, and how it affects us. This poem is a great example, and not just because it’s showing us something that’s not visible, and is literally about a voice that keeps trying to get the speaker’s attention. Filled as it is with conspicuous flourishes and other signs that are impossible to miss, “The Voice” seems to have been built to get us to notice what’s right there in front of us, and understand what it means.

First of all are a couple of word choices so unexpected they seem to have a spotlight on them. The main one is “wistlessness.” It’s one of two words in the poem—the other is “norward”[1]—that are actually nonwords. They don’t exist. There’s also a word that looks, and sounds, so strange and out of place, for a moment I’m not sure it exists either, although it’s a perfectly ordinary word. I’ll come back to it. But first, “wistlessness.”

Even after all these years, every time I get to it—and by now I must know it’s coming—“wistlessness” takes the top of my head right off.[2] Face to face with the undeniable existence of a word that doesn’t exist, I’m as awestruck as I am dubious. It’s like a cartoon word: it’s impossibly silly—and utterly inspired. Somehow it manages to nearly make me laugh and snatch my breath away instead. It’s a word you can swim in, and pass your hand right through (like that “air-blue gown”).

(“Wistlessness" is also a quantum revision of the first edition’s bland-to-the-point-of-saying-nothing “consigned to existlessness.” Happily, that’s an idea that was.)

Then there are those multisyllabic rhymes (e.g., “Manhasset/an asset”; “lot o’ news/hypotenuse”). Not unlike nonce words (e.g., gloomerous), these tend to be humorous, and are usually found in lighthearted poems, like limericks, or Gilbert & Sullivan lyrics. Here though, colored by the rhythm, they have an altogether different effect. It’s a rhythm that refuses to fade into the background, like the unvarying ticking of a clock, or footsteps pacing a conversation on a walk. Though it’s lulling and hypnotic, more of an incantation for sleeping than the time signature for a dance, it sweeps you up like a waltz. Each line begins with a snap, like a head rolling helplessly into sleep catching itself, and ends in a handful of sand trickling through speechless fingers.

Part of what’s so seductive about this rhythm is how, with that second call to me, Hardy sets up an expectation of an echo. As we read on, we listen for it. And when it doesn’t happen, what we hear is its ghost—the ghost of an echo—instead. 

An echo is more than a repetition or reflection of sound; it’s a kind of second chance, like when you suddenly hear in the echo of something someone said the thing they were trying to tell you. It can also be the opposite: The mythical Echo wastes away until all that’s left is a voice that can only repeat the last words someone else has spoken; she’s a figure for being haunted by missed opportunities. 

The more usual form of echo in a poem, of course, is rhyme. “The Voice” is bursting with them: weak, strong, perfect, imperfect, eye, internal, end. Hardy’s poem is virtually ringing with echos, teeming with ghosts.

For three stanzas the dead woman, whether in her own form or in that of the listless breeze, is adamantly “saying,” “standing” and “travelling.” As if to make sure we don’t miss how alive she seems, each of those gerunds is emphatically placed, waiting for us at the top of the second line of each stanza as we round the corner out of the first.  

For three stanzas the speaker addresses the woman directly, as if she’s still there, as if she could answer. He seems to know what she has returned to say. He challenges her to come out from behind the cover of her ghostly voice and show herself to him. But when she does, when he conjures up an image of her from the distant past of their early, happy first days together, his bravado begins to dissolve: “Or is it only the breeze…?” Maybe it’s all in his head.

And here’s where “wistlessness” comes in to signal the futility of his regret, his aimless, depleted longing, their futureless future. “Wistlessness” turns even his certainty that she is gone into a haunted, haunting question where hope revolves with fear: “You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness, / Heard no more again far or near?” Her death has turned him wan and wistless, too[3].

By the time we meet him again at the beginning of the fourth stanza, she’s gone, or rather, the conversation, such as it was, is over, and he has entered the desolate landscape he’s been skirting alone. 

One of the hardest things to square about death is the balance of here-ness and gone-ness. Those of us who have lost someone close know that the dead are both unequivocally gone and yet their presence continues to be felt, like the ghost of an echo. Dead is much more than the opposite of alive, just as wistlessness is much more than the opposite of wistfulness, which hasn’t got one. 

Against the persistence of the dead woman, the living I in the final stanza is no match. He has no choice but to go “forward,” but he does so “faltering” (i.e., stuttering as against her effortless “saying,” stumbling as against her “standing” fast). As time continues to move forward with the breeze, “travelling” and shaking the leaves from the trees, it shakes the speaker, too, until it loosens his grip on the ideas that have held his life, and her death, in place: “leaves around me falling.” He is falling again—from the Eden he remembers as the beginning of their marriage, when “our day was fair,” when they were falling in love—falling now into the wilderness of this new knowledge of death, what it is and what it isn’t. It’s the kind of knowledge we acquire when we go through something (as opposed to thinking or generalizing about it in no matter how nuanced a way). A new kind of winter, he understands, is coming just for him. The waltz is over, and nobody’s leaving. 

“The Voice” concludes on two indelible, otherworldly auditory images. In one of the four gerunds packed into that final, dazed, reeling stanza, the wind is described as “oozing.” Here’s the word that for a split second I’m sure he’s made up—like “wistlessness”—until I remember that it does in fact exist.

Okay, “oozing” is probably not, technically, an auditory image—you can’t normally hear something oozing—but you can hear the wind whistling in the word, and the ghost whistling in the wind. And “oozing” does provide the most corporeal image of the poem. Of the rose of love, it seems to say, what’s left is the (still suppurating) wound and the thorn (of grief, of memory) on which the I continues to be caught. The way we reading stumble and stutter through “thin through the thorn”[4] as well as something like the slime of regret, the stuff you can’t seem to get off you, like the ectoplasm in Ghostbusters.

The other sound, of course, is that of The Voice of the title, the voice of the dead woman. No longer much missed, she’s not quite the opposite of that either; instead she’s simply still there, still—in an echo of the original echo of the poem, though now in a different form, the last and lasting gerund—“calling.”  

All poems are a kind of ghost story. Although most of us probably don’t really believe in ghosts, we want to believe in them. We want to be wrong about death. And we are. We don’t want to be haunted—by regrets, by inconceivable loss, by words spoken or unspoken. But we are. A poem, like a good ghost story and, indeed, like a good ghost, has more substance than even the most deeply and fully realized idea. Maybe that’s because, in all three cases, once they’ve got our attention, they have the power to make visible what we’ve been shrugging off, passing over, turning a blind eye to, tuning out. Sometimes the only way to understand what’s in front of you is to really listen. Which is another word for look. See?