Today’s Poem: Our Little Ghost
Midge Goldberg makes the case for a Louisa May Alcott poem
Our Little Ghost
by Louisa May Alcott
Oft in the silence of the night, When the lonely moon rides high, When wintry winds are whistling, And we hear the owl’s shrill cry; In the quiet, dusky chamber, By the flickering firelight, Rising up between two sleepers, Comes a spirit all in white. A winsome little ghost it is, Rosy-cheeked and bright of eye, With yellow curls all breaking loose From the small cap pushed awry; Up it climbs among the pillows, For the “big dark” brings no dread, And a baby’s busy fancy Makes a kingdom of a bed. A fearless little ghost it is; Safe the night as is the day; The lonely moon to it is fair, The sighing winds to it are gay. The solitude is full of friends, And the hour brings no regrets, For in this happy little soul Shines a sun that never sets. A merry little ghost it is, Dancing gayly by itself On the flowery counterpane, Like a tricksy household elf; Nodding to the fitful shadows As they flicker on the wall, Talking to familiar pictures, Mimicking the owl’s shrill call. A thoughtful little ghost it is; And when lonely gambols tire, With chubby hands on chubby knees, Sits winking at the fire; Fancies innocent and lovely Shine before those baby eyes; Sunny fields of dandelions, Brooks, and birds, and butterflies. A loving little ghost it is, When crept into its nest, Its hand on father’s shoulder laid, Its head on mother’s breast, It watches each familiar face With a tranquil, trusting eye, And, like a sleepy little bird, Sings its own soft lullaby. Then those who feigned to sleep before, Lest baby play till dawn, Wake and watch their folded flower, Little rose without a thorn! And in the silence of the night, The hearts that love it most, Pray tenderly above its sleep, “God bless our little ghost!” ═════════════════════════
Joseph Bottum writes:
Midge Goldberg is a writer in New Hampshire. Recipient of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award and the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, she has published many poems, translations, reviews, and essays in national and international publications. Perhaps more to the point, she is a friend of Poems Ancient and Modern, and after our recent discussion of Willa Cather’s poetry she suggested that some of Louisa May Alcott’s deserves a look, written by another novelist who dabbled in verse.
Since Ms. Goldberg is a fellow New Englander, we thought that sounded like a good idea. The author of her own collection, To Be Opened After My Death, she is also editor of Outer Space, a collection of one hundred poems about space. And like all good anthologists, her vast reading has led her down some interesting byways — in this case, a light but strange household poem about a baby ghost.
Midge Goldberg writes:
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), best known for her novel Little Women and its sequels, is another famous author not recognized for her poetry. In this case, however, Alcott falls between the categories described by Poems Ancient and Modern: those who wrote simply for fun and those for whom it was as much of a serious aspiration as their fiction.
Alcott’s first publication, at age 19, was a poem called “Sunlight.” Her poetry appeared in popular Boston newspapers and journals, and her elegy for Henry David Thoreau was published in the Atlantic. Most of those early works addressed her work ethic, morals, religious beliefs, and nature, reflecting the sensibilities of the time. She also included poetry in her novels: Jo March, for example, the character modeled after Louisa in Little Women, writes poems as well as stories.
After the success of Little Women in 1868, Alcott recognized where her talents lay and largely stopped publishing poetry. Nonetheless, Today’s Poem (published in The Flag of Our Union in 1866) gives us what I imagine is Alcott’s own humorous, playful voice, like that of Jo: having a little fun, trying to scare the reader just a little, and making the ghost child more a human than an angel.
To create her nuance and atmosphere, Alcott plays with meter and language in the seven eight-line stanzas, all rhymed xaxaxbxb. The first line — with its inverted first foot, “Oft, in the silence of the night” — tells us already that the poem will sound like someone telling a scary story. The vowel sounds of “lonely moon” echo a melancholy ghost or an owl’s hoots, the phrase “wintery winds are whistling” imitates the sound outside the window, and the spondee of the owl’s “shrill cry” pierces the night air.
Alcott uses a near repetend to describe the ghost in each stanza. Stanza two introduces the “winsome little ghost” with a upbeat mix of iambic and trochaic tetrameter, including four catalectic lines (lacking a syllable in the last foot). The blond-haired baby is busy playing house, making “a kingdom of a bed.” The “fearless” ghost of the third stanza is comfortable with the night, the hour, and the “sighing winds,” still a “happy little soul” with iambic tetrameter mixing with the catalectic lines.
It’s in the fourth stanza that Alcott — using “merry” as perhaps a stand-in for something more ambiguous — delves deeper into the ghost’s mischievous nature. The ghost is compared to a “tricksy household elf” who is “mimicking the owl’s shrill call” of the first stanza. The five clipped catalectic lines (the most of any of these stanzas) hint at the capriciousness of the ghost. Unlike angelic children who wait for their loved ones on a distant heavenly shore in other Alcott poems such as “Little Paul” and “My Beth” (not exactly a child, but childlike) this ghost stays at home and is familiar with the dark, “nodding to the fitful shadows / as they flicker on the wall.”
Like all children, ghosts or not, however, this one eventually gets tired. It “sits winking at the fire” — Alcott’s first use of trimeter, illustrating its waning energy. Stanzas six and seven have only two catalectic lines and more trimeter as the ghost readies for bed. In the last stanza, Alcott’s line, “And in the silence of the night,” is, I assume, a nod to “In the forests of the night,” from William Blake’s “The Tyger,” a poem well-known for its catalectic lines. She intersperses her catalectics with more regular meter than Blake does, her bedroom is not as scary as the forest, and her ghost doesn’t evoke terror like the tiger, but I’d guess that Alcott is giving her readers a final wink, like the tricksy household elf she writes about.
My thoughts in reading went immediately to the fact that this was still an age when so many children died in infancy that its audience would quickly personalize the playful little ghost.
Thank you for that wonderful analysis. I learned so much!