Poems that Haunt Us: 6 Spooky Verses
It’s that spooky time of year, dear Poets, so light those candles, curl up, and let your darkness out to play as we discuss the poems that haunt us—poems about haunting that have grabbed hold of literary consciousness and refused to let go ever since.
Let’s begin with the assumption that ghosts are real and we, all of us, have always known that. If you're resistant to that idea, we can at least agree that haunting has been a useful metaphor for poets throughout history. The way many poets represent ghosts changed in the nineteenth century, however, when things became personal. Poets started practicing what’s been called in literary history “the internalization of spirits”—the trope of finding ghostly terror within the poetic speaker’s internal word rather than the external world. Poets widely follow this model today.
Whether real or not, ghosts have long represented our shadows and what doesn’t fit as it should, as it’s supposed to. Somewhere between alive and dead, there and not, material and ethereal, hauntings remind us of the remainder, what’s left after we’ve done our best to order our fears and anxieties into clean systems of meaning. Specters take the shape of parts of us that feel like too much. It’s that excess that haunts us, and ghosts are the literary devices that allow haunting to take hold.
As Parul Sehgal writes,“The ghost story shape-shifts because ghosts themselves are protean – they emanate from specific cultural fears and fantasies…[Ghosts] are social critiques camouflaged with cobwebs, the past clamoring for redress.”
Here are some of the poems that haunt us and the ghosts they produce. A few classics and a few examples of how contemporary poems reframe internalized haunting. Read on, Poets, if you dare…
1) Emily Dickinson
“One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted”
Mama Dickinson took poetry in so many different directions, and her poem “One Need not be a Chamber” exemplifies the nineteenth-century trend of haunting from within. It begins:
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 its interior Confronting—
That Cooler Host.
Here, external ghosts, the ones we’re told to fear, are less threatening than the ones in our minds. Forget haunted houses or ghostly horses in old abbeys, the real terror is to be found within ourselves. The poem warns of listening to our own fears and anxieties, calling them “Assassins hid in our Apartment,” evoking the classic horror film line, “the call is coming from inside the house!” Feeling like we can’t trust our own thoughts and feelings is a profound form of terror, and one that makes us ghosts to ourselves.
2) Gregory Orr
“Origin of the Marble Forest”
Sometimes I’ll be going about my day and suddenly feel thoroughly unsettled. Did I leave the stove on? Misplace my phone? Whose birthday did I miss? Then I’ll realize what it is: my mind has drifted again to Gregory Orr’s “Origin of the Marble Forest,” a five-line stunner with hauntingly thrifty language and stark imagery. Here’s the full poem:
Childhood dotted with bodies.
Let them go, let them
be ghosts.No, I said,
make them stay, make them stone.
What gets me in this poem is the flattened diction that the poetic speaker uses to frame their childhood. People from the speaker’s past—lovers, villains, the ones they’re not willing to let go of—are referenced as mere “bodies,” signaling the speaker’s emotional distance from their childhood. These bodies dot the landscape, doing nothing more than occupying some unknown amount of space in the visual field. That’s it. They’re afforded no subjectivity or agency. They're simply there.
An unidentified voice, like a cry for mercy, urges the speaker to release the bodies, as though they are captives. The speaker refuses, instead demanding the bodies be turned into stone, like monuments to the past, registering the speaker’s unwillingness to let go, to let ghosts be ghosts. Reflecting on the title, we see the speaker’s childhood has become something else now, and has its own mythology and origin story. It doesn’t erase that brief moment, though, two lines worth of breath, when the speaker could have chosen to let go. In the end, it’s hard not to sympathize with the bodies turned to stone, and the poem encourages us to reflect on the effects it has on our ghosts when we refuse to let go.
➡ Learn more about Gregory Orr
3) Khalisa Rae
“All Hallowed Eve”
Ghost in Khalisa Rae’s collection Ghosts in a Black Girl’s Throat are like mythological chimeras: singular monsters that combine many hybrid forms into one. The collection explores the heart-wrenching reconciliation and confrontation of the living, breathing ghosts that awaken Black women each day, and the poetic speaker in particular, who is a Black woman recently moved to a haunted southern town where streets are named after slave owners and confederate symbols are part of the local decor. For example, here is the full text of “All Hallowed Eve”:
We have been conditioned to be
wanted treats, trained to market ourselves
as ready for purchase. Our limbs available
twenty-four hours a day for those in need.
We should be pleased to be taken
home, honored to be the shiniest
pumpkin with the least damage. The one
he wanted to chisel a jack-o’-lantern smile
into and set outside for show.
The poem examines how the specter of American slavery, now transmuted to daily racism, works on and inside the bodies of Black women, who have been conditioned to internalize the ghost of the auction block. It shows how both whiteness and misogyny connect in their insidious demands to be upheld quietly, as Black women are expected to perform without response in this modern reformation of the horrors of chattel slavery. Do yourself a favor and check out the entire collection, and give extra time to “Tea Party at the Cemetery.”
4) Edgar Allan Poe
“The Raven”
Poe was definitely going on the list. Although his poem “The Haunted Palace” fits the theme better, it’s a narrative poem about the destruction of a beautiful palace that’s transformed into a haunted mansion to allegorize the physical damage that can accompany mental illness – “The Raven” is really fun to read out loud in the dark. I encourage you to do so, paying extra attention to the way the ballad haunts itself with its refrains, “nothing more” and “nevermore.” Here’s an example:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door—
“'Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”…..
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
The scene opens on a “dreary,” boring night as the speaker quietly reads old, forgotten stories to lament losing the beloved Lenore, when suddenly there's tapping, first the door – perhaps it’s the ghost of Lenore? No one’s at the door, but the sound moves to the window, where a raven taps to be let in. Once inside, the raven perches on a statue of Pallas, or Athena, goddess of wisdom, who grieved so hard for her beloved that she took the memory of her beloved inside of herself to preserve their love forever, turning herself into a living monument. The raven personifies the feelings of intense grief and loss, while other symbols throughout the poem reinforce a melodramatic mood that emphasizes the speaker’s failed attempts to control and repress their emotions, like ghosts that won’t be exorcised.
5) Elizabeth Jennings
“Ghosts”
I love a ghost in a sonnet. Something about finding ghoulishness in the poetic love form feels surprising and correct. Elizabeth Jennings, a prominent figure in the 1950s British poetry movement, gives us just that in her poem “Ghosts”:
Those houses haunt in which we leave
Something undone. It is not those
Great words or silence of loveThat spread their echoes through a place
And fill the locked-up, unbreathed gloom.
Ghosts do not haunt with any faceThat we have known; they only come
With arrogance to thrust at us
Our own omissions in a room.The words we would not speak they use,
The deeds we dared not act they flaunt,
Our nervous silences they bruise;It is our helplessness they choose
And our refusals that they haunt.
Rather than focusing on apparitions, Jennings explores the ways people become their own haunted houses. Here ghosts haunt through memories of non-moments, the times when you froze, didn't respond how you wanted to, remained silent when you had so much to say. In this way, the trope of the haunted house becomes a poetic playspace to explore the psychological and emotional impact of those moments we cannot take back or change, as much as those moments haunt us to do things differently next time. Jennings suggests it’s our refusal to consider those differences that create our ghosts or the ghost selves we lament. The sonnet ends with a glimmer of hope. If ghosts occupy the “locked-up” spaces with “unbreathed gloom,” throw the shutters open wide and air out your cobwebbed regrets with some fresh air. Use all your words and there’s none left for ghosts to thrust at.
6) Louise Glück
“All Hallows”
Rest in peace and poetry. Nobel prize-winning poet Louise Glück passed away recently, on this month’s Friday the 13th, which I think would have made her say, “of course.” Her poem “All Hallows” makes the list because of the disconcerting way that anxiety seems to almost appear (but never fully materialize) throughout the poem. The three stanzas inhabit one liminal space after another: it doesn’t follow a rhyme scheme but is full of slant rhymes (two words that rhyme in part, but not perfectly), links antithetical images like barrenness and a harvest landscape, and moves from landscape to homescape through the figure of a ghost child:
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little oneAnd the soul creeps out of the tree.
The extended metaphor connects harvested fields with a singular “wife” figure who holds a hand out the window “as in payment” while calling for a ghost child to crawl out of its tree. The first stanza paints a landscape of loneliness and darkness overseen by an eerily “toothed moon.” The second stanza moves us indoors to an empty homespace. We don’t know if it’s empty from harvest—reaping abundance from what has been sown—or from pestilence, and the poem seems unconcerned with this distinction. As though having resources for the winter or having none doesn’t mean the difference between life and death in many communities, and this conflation creates an anxious tone throughout. The house is simply empty, except for the solitary wife, alone, calling back a ghost child and offering her most precious resources in payment, herself. So many sinister vibes in this American gothic poem depicting the relationship between mother and child.
➡ Find “Allow Hallows” and more poems by Louise Glück here
Happy Spooky Season!
Feeling inspired to write your own haunt? Make sure to check out The Poetry Lab Podcast episode “Bringing Ghosts to Life in Your Writing” for practical pointers on craft and approach.
Creep it real, Poets, and don’t forget to send a little extra love to your ghosts this spooky season lest they turn to stone. Below you’ll find links to other poems to read in the dark, and I leave you with my newest favorite creepy poem: “Hunger” by Michael Bazzett from his collection The Echo Chamber: Poems.
They say you catch more|
flies with honey.Dead bodies
also work. The questionIs why you want
flies at all.Trust me. They will come
soon enough.I’ve heard they visit
the eyes first.
For more poems to read this spooky season, check out:
🎃 Popular Classic Poems for Halloween
This article was published on October 23, 2023. Written by:
