Poem of the Day: ‘Haunted Houses’

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) has appeared often in the Poem of the Day feature in The New York Sun. We’ve run little-known Longfellow and  sentimental Longfellow, and Longfellow on the year’s occasions: Christmas, Winter, and Graduation Day. So why not another, for Halloween?

Yet what Longfellow gives us is not strictly a Halloween poem. “Haunted Houses” is perhaps the clearest poem, certainly the best old American poem, that notices the crowding specters, the quiet dead, the gentle ghosts that surround us: “All houses wherein men have lived and died / Are haunted houses,” the poem begins, and Longfellow looks to see that what “has been” is “visible and clear.” The speaker of the poem lives in a far thicker world than others know: “There are more guests at table than the hosts / Invited.” 

In ten stanzas of pentameter quatrains, rhymed abab, the poem has an easy flow that hides the difficulty of its construction. The dead are with us, and those who look carefully discern that “The spirit-world around this world of sense / Floats like an atmosphere.”