Category: Phantom Voices

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.

The Voices by James Whitcomb Riley

Down in the night I hear them:
The Voices—unknown—unguessed,—
That whisper, and lisp, and murmur,
And will not let me rest.—

Voices that seem to question,
In unknown words, of me,
Of fabulous ventures, and hopes and dreams
Of this and the World to be.

Voices of mirth and music,
As in sumptuous homes; and sounds
Of mourning, as of gathering friends
In country burial-grounds.

Cadence of maiden voices—
Their lovers’ blent with these;
And of little children singing,
As under orchard trees.

And often, up from the chaos
Of my deepest dreams, I hear
Sounds of their phantom laughter
Filling the atmosphere:

They call to me from the darkness;
They cry to me from the gloom,
Till I start sometimes from my pillow
And peer through the haunted room;

When the face of the moon at the window
Wears a pallor like my own,
And seems to be listening with me
To the low, mysterious tone,—

The low, mysterious clamor
Of voices that seem to be
Striving in vain to whisper
Of secret things to me;—

Of a something dread to be warned of;
Of a rapture yet withheld;
Or hints of the marvelous beauty
Of songs unsyllabled.

But ever and ever the meaning
Falters and fails and dies,
And only the silence quavers
With the sorrow of my sighs.

And I answer:—O Voices, ye may not
Make me to understand
Till my own voice, mingling with you,
Laughs in the Shadow-land.

The Phantom Voice by Sarah Helen Whitman

 

Through the solemn hush of midnight,
How sadly on my ear
Falls the echo of a harp whose tones
I never more may hear!

A wild, unearthly melody,
Whose monotone doth move
The saddest, sweetest cadences
Of sorrow and of love:

Till the burden of remembrance weighs
Like lead upon my heart,
And the shadow, on my soul that sleeps,
Will never more depart.

The ghastly moonlight, gliding
Like a phantom through the gloom,
How it fills with solemn fantasies
My solitary room!

And the sighing winds of Autumn,
Ah! how sadly they repeat
That low, bewildering melody,
So mystically sweet!

I hear it softly murmuring
At midnight o’er the hill,
Or across the wide savannas,
When all beside is still.

I hear it in the moaning
Of the melancholy main;
In the rushing of the night-wind,
The rhythm of the rain.

E’en the wild-flowers of the forest,
Waving sadly to and fro,
But whisper to my boding heart
The burden of its woe.

And the spectral moon, now paling
And fading, seems to say,
“I leave thee to remembrances
That will not pass away.”

Ah, through all the solemn midnight,
How mournful ’t is to hark
To the voices of the silence,
The whisper of the dark!

In vain I turn, some solace
From the distant stars to crave:
They are shining on thy sepulchre,
Are smiling on thy grave.

How I weary of their splendor!
All night long they seem to say,
“We are lonely,—sad and lonely,—
Far away,—far, far away!”

Thus, through all the solemn midnight,
That phantom voice I hear,
As it echoes through the silence,
When no earthly sound is near.

And though dawn-light yields to noon-light,
And though darkness turns to day,
They but leave me to remembrances
That will not pass away.