The House of Ghosts was bright within,
Aglow and warm and gay,
A place my own once loved me in,
That is not there by day:
My hound lay drowsing on the floor:
From sunken graves returned
My folk that I was lonely for
Sat where the hearth-fire burned.
There was no lightest echo lost
When I undid the door,
There was no shadow where I crossed
The well-remembered floor.
I bent to whisper to my hound
(So long he had been dead!)
He slept no lighter nor more sound,
He did not lift his head.
I brushed my father as I came;
He did not move or see—
I cried upon my mother’s name;
She did not look at me.
Their faces in the firelight bent,
They smiled in speaking slow
Of some old gracious merriment
Forgotten years ago.
I was so changed since they had died!
How could they know or guess
A voice that plead for love, and cried
Of grief and loneliness?
Out from the House of Ghosts I fled
Lest I should turn and see
The child I had been lift her head
And stare aghast at me!
Credits
Margaret Widdemer was an American poet and novelist, active in the early twentieth century, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1919. She was known for verse that explored loss, memory, and the interior lives of women with quiet emotional precision. "The House of Ghosts" showcases her gift for building a domestic scene into something unsettling, turning the familiar architecture of home into a mirror for grief.
