Amy Lowell, a Massachusetts poet who became the most visible American champion of Imagism, published “Haunted” in her 1916 collection Men, Women and Ghosts. Imagism, part of the early twentieth-century modernist wave, called for free verse, direct treatment of the subject, and no excess words; its poets, influenced by Japanese and Chinese verse, wanted a hard, clear image rather than a foggy moral. That context matters because “Haunted” is a ghost story made almost entirely of such images. There is no plot, no backstory, no explanation of who the spirit is. Instead, Lowell drops the reader into a single moonlit moment of violation.
The speaker is indoors, perhaps near a window, watching and feeling a ghost arrive not as a robed figure but as a set of disconnected body parts. It trails its toes “through the long streaks of moonlight”; its fingernails “claw and flash among the tree-tops.” Those fragments make the creature enormous and uncontainable. Then the contact turns intimate. Its lips “suck at my open window,” and its breath “creeps about my body / And lies in pools under my knees.” The haunting is not mainly visual; it is tactile, oral, and atmospheric. The poem’s central idea is that supernatural dread can be experienced as bodily invasion, a dissolving of the boundary between inside and outside, safety and exposure.
Lowell shapes that uncanny feeling through free verse whose irregular lines move like the breath she describes. There is no rhyme, but there is deliberate rhythm created by line length and by sharp exclamations: “See!” and later “Hark!” These commands yank the reader into the speaker’s perception, as if the ghost is present right now. The language accumulates physical verbs: trails, claw, flash, suck, creeps, lies, sway, wobble, sticking. Many are present participles, giving the action a suspended, ongoing quality. Alliteration such as “lips suck,” “sway and wobble,” and “wind tears a shutter” makes the sounds feel sticky or violent.
The poem turns on the image of the moonlit floor “Without a shadow.” A solid body in bright light should cast one; the absence of a shadow is the one conventional proof that this thing is not quite there. Yet it has breath, lips, and nails. That paradox is the engine of the poem’s dread. The word “moonlight” recurs because it is beautiful and cold, and it reveals emptiness where a body should be. The speaker’s body is also described in fragments—body, knees—so ghost and speaker begin to mirror each other, both reduced to vulnerable surfaces.
What makes “Haunted” significant is how seriously it takes the sensory power of fear. Instead of explaining that the house is cursed, Lowell lets a mouth “sway and wobble” against a window-frame until the image becomes grotesquely fleshy. The final lines broaden the menace beyond the room: “A hare is strangling in the forest. / And the wind tears a shutter from the wall.” Something is being killed out there; something is being torn open here. The poem ends not with resolution but with violent noise, leaving the speaker and the reader inside a world where moonlight has become a medium for haunting. For students, it is a model of making emotion physical: every ghostly detail is shown, never merely named.