Shelley's speaker never waits for the ghosts to appear. He opens by shouting at them: "Ghosts of the dead! have I not heard your yelling". The question is really a boast about all the nights he has stood out on Jura in the dark, "braved the chill night-tempest's fury", and heard "murmurs of death" in the noise. The poem then narrows from this crowd of ghosts to one: "O father! thy voice seems to strike on mine ear." Its central idea is that grief can turn a storm into a message. The wind, thunder and mist are never said to be ghosts. They are what a mourning mind hears and sees when it is alone on a mountain and desperate to be answered.
The poem is careful about how sure it lets the speaker be, and this is where its quiet drama lies. In the second stanza the murmurs of death are things "I thought" he heard. In the third the father's voice only "seems" to strike his ear. By the last stanza the father "Perhaps rides" the whirlwind. Certainty drains away just as the vision gets more vivid. The sentence that carries the final image never even finishes. "Whilst a wreath of dark vapour encircles his head" trails off without a main verb to steady it, so the poem ends on a picture rather than a conclusion.
The sound of the verse does much of the storm's work. Each stanza is a quatrain rhyming ABAB, and the lines move in a galloping, tumbling rhythm, with four strong beats and unstressed syllables rushing between them, like gusts. The first and third lines of every stanza end on a trailing, unstressed rhyme: "yelling/swelling," "Jura/fury," "howling/rolling," "mountain/fountain." The second and fourth lines land on hard single syllables: "blast," "passed," "death," "jar," "dead," "head." The effect is a long roll of wind followed by a crack. One rhyme slips, since "ear" and "jar" in the third stanza are not a true pair. That may be an accident of the verse, but it suits the line, which speaks of "the pause of the elements' jar." The rhyme itself jars at exactly the moment the father's voice is meant to break through.
The imagery is built from a small, dark vocabulary that keeps repeating. "Dark" appears in the title and again in "dark aether" and "dark vapour," while "night" is stamped into compounds like "night-rolling," "night-tempest" and "night-storm." The repetition makes the world on the mountain feel closed in and without daylight. Everything is also in motion: the blast "rolls," the whirlwind "eddies," the tide of the storm "rolls" again. Shelley mixes the physical with the supernatural in single phrases. A "tide" of storm suggests the sea, a "wing" of whirlwind suggests a bird or an angel, and a "wreath" of vapour suggests a funeral garland or a crown. The father's ghost is made from these borrowed pieces, so he is never described as a man at all.
Even the landscape seems to take a side. Jura "frowns" on the valley below, which gives the mountain a face and a mood. Against all that roaring the last stanza offers a softer note, the mist that "hangs o'er the fountain." After the violence of the wind, the stillness of hanging mist and the idea of a fountain, a spring or source, give the vision a gentler, almost tender ending.
This is a short poem, but it shows something that matters in Romantic writing. Nature is more than a backdrop; it is the place where inner feeling takes outward shape. Judging by the imagery, it also draws on the Gothic taste for storms and ghosts, but it uses that taste for grief rather than fright. Readers who know Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" will recognise the wind as a huge, invisible power that carries a human voice. Here, though, the wind carries a lost father's voice, and the speaker is never sure whether he has really heard it.