ghosts – The Emily Project

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Far safer, of a midnight meeting External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter
In lonesome place.
Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror’s least.
The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O’erlooking a superior spectre
More near.
~Emily Dickinson

I have very little to say about this one. It’s perfect, really, and completely true. We are the most terrifying spectres we will ever meet. Humans can be haunted by the past, by the undone, by the unrealized. Our minds are more expansive than any construction, and so are vastly more capable of housing ghosts. The lines about encountering oneself in a lonesome place on a moonless night are especially vivid. We hide our true selves behind our external selves, and what we carry inside us should concern us more than any outer threat.

Though I doubt Dickinson was thinking specifically about writing and scary stories with this one, it also works on that kind of meta-level–we carry within us all the scary stories we are capable of creating.

THOUGH I get home how late, how late!
So I get home, ’t will compensate.
Better will be the ecstasy
That they have done expecting me,
When, night descending, dumb and dark,
They hear my unexpected knock.
Transporting must the moment be,
Brewed from decades of agony!
To think just how the fire will burn,
Just how long-cheated eyes will turn To wonder what myself will say,
And what itself will say to me,
Beguiles the centuries of way!
~Emily Dickinson

I *think* this is a ghost story–sort of a surprise ghost story that reveals itself in the last line. The speaker is longing to be home, anticipating the welcome she’ll receive.

In the first stanza, it sounds as though she’s been gone for a long time–“decades of agony.” This is still logistically believable. Maybe she’s been gone a really long time, and will show up when her loved ones are least expecting her arrival, years after they’ve given up on her return.

It’s only in the final line of the poem that we begin to realize what’s really going on here. She’s been absent not just for decades, but for “centuries of way.” Is she talking about arriving in heaven? The little details of the poem seem more homely that what we might expect of paradise–the eyes of her loved ones turning to see her, unexpectedly; the fire burning in the hearth. Because it’s spooky-month, I’m going to read this one as a tiny little ghost story about a lost spirit wandering the universe, striving to get back to those she loved in life.

Tag: ghosts

One need not be a chamber to be haunted

Ghost story?