"Ghost House" (A Poem)

Composed in 1901 and published in 1915, Robert Frost’s poem “Ghost House” uses an old, burned-down house in Frost’s hometown of Derry, New Hampshire, as inspiration for a tale of a ghost who continues to haunt the land of the destroyed dwelling they once inhabited.[1]

I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me —
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad —
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad, —
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.[2]

Works Referenced

Frost, Robert. “Ghost House.” A Boy’s Will. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. 12-13.

Timmerman, John. Robert Frost: The Ethics of Ambiguity. Lewisburg, PA: Bicknell University Press, 2002.
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[1] Timmerman, 25.
[2] Frost, 12-13.