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Phantom by Guanetta Grant Gordon

Last night when the moon was free
I sent a breeze as messenger
To brush a kiss across your lips.
Did you turn your head, alert
Because it ruffled up your hair
So like my fingers, light as air?
Did you close your eyes to dream
And hear the rustle of the leaves?
It was my echo, whispering
My heart, my soul, belong to you!
And always, when the moon hangs low
Should you but pause and wish for me
You will feel my presence near,
Lingering in every shadow
Beneath the pale moonglow of night.

Clair de Lune by Claude Houghton

Pallid ghosts and phantoms frail,
Fancies born of vague regrets,
‘Neath a moon divinely pale
Whisper words the dawn forgets;
Ghosts of pain and ghosts of pleasure
Glide in graceful rhythmic measure.

Vanished days and dead desires,
Perished hopes and faded dreams,
To the magic sound of lyres
Glide amid the moon’s gray beams;
Glide and beckon, whisper lightly,
Vanish slowly, glimmering whitely.

Ghosts by Madison Cawein

Low, weed-climbed cliffs, o’er which at noon
The sea-mists swoon:
Wind-twisted pines, through which the crow
Goes winging slow:

Dim fields the sower never sows,
Or reaps or mows:
And near the sea a ghostly house of stone
Where all is old and lone.

A garden, falling in decay,
Where statues gray
Peer, broken, out of tangled weed
And thorny seed;

Satyr and Nymph, that once made love
By walk and grove:
And, near a fountain, shattered, green with mould,
A sundial, lichen-old.

Like some sad life bereft,
To musing left,
The house stands: love and youth
Both gone, in sooth:

But still it sits and dreams:
And round it seems
Some memory of the past, still young and fair,
Haunting each crumbling stair.

And suddenly one dimly sees,
Come through the trees,
A woman, like a wild moss-rose:
A man, who goes

Softly: and by the dial
They kiss a while:
Then drowsily the mists blow round them, wan,
And they like ghosts are gone.

So ghostly then the Girl Came In by Robert Hillyer

So ghostly then the girl came in
I never saw the turnstile twist
Down where the orchard trees begin
Lost in a reverie of mist.

And in the windless hour between
The last of daylight and the night,
When fields give up their ebbing green
And two bats interweave their flight,

I saw the turnstile glimmer pale
Just where the orchard trees begin,
But watching was of no avail,
Invisibly the girl came in.

I took one deep breath of the air
And lifted up my heavy heart;
It was not I who trembled there
But my immortal counterpart.

i knew that she had come again
Up from the orchard through the stile,
Without a sigh to tell me when,
Though I was watching all the while.

After a Journey by Thomas Hardy

 

Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;

Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

Up the cliff, down, till I’m lonely, lost,

And the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me.

Where you will next be there’s no knowing,

Facing round about me everywhere,

With your nut-coloured hair,

And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.
Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;

What have you now found to say of our past—

Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?

Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?

Things were not lastly as firstly well

With us twain, you tell?

But all’s closed now, despite Time’s derision.
I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,

The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,

And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,

When you were all aglow,

And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!
Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,

The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily;

Soon you have, Dear, to vanish from me,

For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.

Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,

The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!

I am just the same as when

Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

The Haunted Garden by Madison Julius Cawein

There a tattered marigold
And dead asters manifold,
Showed him where the garden old
Of time bloomed:
Briar and thistle overgrew
Corners where the rose once blew,
Where the phlox of every hue
Lay entombed.

Here a coreopsis flower
Pushed its disc above a bower,
Where once poured a starry shower,
Bronze and gold:
And a twisted hollyhock,
And the remnant of a stock,
Struggled up, ‘mid burr and dock,
Through the mold.

Flower-pots, with mossy cloak,
Strewed a place beneath an oak,
Where the garden-bench lay broke
By the tree:
And he thought of her, who here
Sat with him but yesteryear;
Her, whose presence now seemed near
Stealthily.

And the garden seemed to look
For her coming. Petals shook
On the spot where, with her book,
Oft she sat.—
Suddenly there blew a wind:
And across the garden blind,
Like a black thought in a mind,
Stole a cat.

Lean as hunger; like the shade
Of a dream; a ghost unlaid;
Through the weeds its way it made,
Gaunt and old:
Once ’t was hers. He looked to see
If she followed to the tree.—
Then recalled how long since she
Had been mold.

The Flowering Corpse by Djuna Barnes

 

So still she lies in this closed place apart,

Her feet grown fragile for the ghostly tryst;

Her pulse no longer striking in her wrist,

Nor does its echo wander through her heart.

Over the body and the quiet head

Like stately ferns above an austere tomb,

Soft hairs blow; and beneath her armpits bloom

The drowsy passion flowers of the dead.

 

Haunted by Louis Untermeyer

 

Between the moss and stone

The lonely lilies rise;

Wasted and overgrown

The tangled garden lies.

Weeds climb about the stoop

And clutch the crumbling walls;

The drowsy grasses droop—

The night wind falls.

The place is like a wood;

No sign is there to tell

Where rose and iris stood

That once she loved so well.

Where phlox and asters grew,

A leafless thornbush stands,

And shrubs that never knew

Her tender hands….

Over the broken fence

The moonbeams trail their shrouds;

Their tattered cerements

Cling to the gauzy clouds,

In ribbons frayed and thin—

And startled by the light

Silence shrinks deeper in

The depths of night.

Useless lie spades and rakes;

Rust’s on the garden-tools.

Yet, where the moonlight makes

Nebulous silver pools

A ghostly shape is cast—

Something unseen has stirred….

Was it a breeze that passed?

Was it a bird?

Dead roses lift their heads

Out of a grassy tomb;

From ruined pansy-beds

A thousand pansies bloom.

The gate is opened wide—

The garden that has been

Now blossoms like a bride….

Who entered in?

Haunted Garden by Robin Hyde

The primulas are scanted of colour here,
They are as young lips knowing too little of love;
And the dusky weight of the laurel boughs above
Is a stern crown plaited for young brows lessoned in care.
Yea, and the scarlet shallop anemones
Bend in the wind for the warm white lute-string beach,
For the Orphic meadows no longing of mine can reach,
Who am prisoner here in the warded house of the trees.

But the small white poisonous flowers crumble into my days,
And the steel-bright arc of the fountain-drops pierces my heart.
I am as one who stumbles the yew-tree maze,
Where ever dreamer and dream are thrust further apart,
Till the little pools of starlight shine chill with danger,
Till the breath of the earth is a rising pearl-white smoke,
And he dare not stretch forth his hand, to touch the cloak
Of her who waits by the fountain, the motionless stranger.

And dusk is a statue, and thought is a chrysophrase set
Bleak on a brow half-seen through the leaning blue trees;
And the frail eve weighted by robes of sarcenet
Rests her sceptre of dreaming across her knees.
Heavy her spell upon heart, upon outstretched hands —
Only the ghost-world’s silver freights again
The barren orchard with blossom, limns the tall standing grain,
The watchful glistening spears of enchanted lands.