Ghosts

    There are ghosts in the room.
As I sit here alone, from the dark corners there
They come out of the gloom,
And they stand at my side and they lean on my chair

    There’s a ghost of a Hope
That lighted my days with a fanciful glow,
In her hand is the rope
That strangled her life out. Hope was slain long ago.

    But her ghost comes to-night
With its skeleton face and expressionless eyes,
And it stands in the light,
And mocks me, and jeers me with sobs and with sighs.

    There’s the ghost of a Joy,
A frail, fragile thing, and I prized it too much,
And the hands that destroy
Clasped its close, and it died at the withering touch.

    There’s the ghost of a Love,
Born with joy, reared with hope, died in pain and unrest,
But he towers above
All the others—this ghost; yet a ghost at the best,

    I am weary, and fain
Would forget all these dead: but the gibbering host
Make my struggle in vain—
In each shadowy corner there lurketh a ghost.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 19, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Ghosts” appeared in the Poetical Works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (W. P. Nimmo, Hay, & Mitchell, 1917), in the section titled “Poems of Hope.” In her essay, “Symmetrical Womanhood: Poetry in the Woman’s Building Library,” published by the University of Texas Press, poet and scholar Angela Sorby affirmed, “While Wilcox’s poems—with their ringing rhymes, facile forms, and inflated emotions—are clearly products of the genteel idealist sensibility, they are distinctive in one striking respect: they are rooted, firmly and explicitly, in the female body. Her poems neither veil the self in sentimental modesty nor escape into an ideal disembodied universalism. Instead, they make the author’s desires into a driving force. […] Ella Wheeler Wilcox embodies the contradictions of the period because her poems’ speakers are independent but also limited in their range of motion and emotion. Her poems are middlebrow, self-assured, daring (but not too daring), and committed to expressing specific ambitions that can be realized within a mainstream poetic framework.”