Arthur Stringer, a Canadian poet and novelist born in 1874, wrote during the early decades of the twentieth century, when modern hospitals and the smell of ether had become part of public consciousness and writers were increasingly interested in how a single sensation could summon the past. His short lyric “Anæsthesia” makes that process almost unbearably vivid. Through two separate flashes of memory—one set in a hospital, one bent over an old letter—Stringer suggests that the deepest human experiences are not stored in chronological narrative but in the body’s senses, waiting for an odour to set them loose.
The opening lines drop the reader into a remembered moment without explanation. The speaker catches the smell of ether near a glass-roofed room where a hospital stood, and immediately the present dissolves into “a mist of anguish / And the old, old hour of dread / When Death had shambled by.” The repetition of “old” makes the fear feel ancient and personal at once. Death is not a dramatic skeleton but something that “shambled,” clumsy and lingering, as if it passed close enough to be felt. The word “caught” matters too: the speaker did not choose this memory; the smell reached him by accident.
The second stanza creates a structural mirror of the first, but now the trigger is perfume rising from a letter yellowed by time. The inverted syntax of “Yellow with time it is, / This letter on which I look” emphasises age before object, as though the past announces itself before the present can catch up. That perfume “stabs me still to the heart,” a phrase whose present tense shows that memory is not safely finished. At the odour, the speaker enters another ghost-like mist and knows “Rapture and love and wild regret / When Life, and You, went by.” Here the lost beloved and life itself are paired, as if loving and living departed together. The two mist-like moments balance each other: one is built around Death, the other around Life and You, but both are piercingly sensory.
Stringer constructs the lyric as a pair of parallel moments rather than a regular stanzaic form. The lines are unrhymed and of uneven length, which lets the movement feel like drifting through mental fog; the repeated words “suddenly,” “mist,” and “odour” link the two halves without the need for rhyme. Yet sound is still carefully managed. Long, open vowels in “old, old hour,” “ghost-like,” and “odour” slow the reading, while the abrupt consonant clusters in “caught,” “stabs,” and “dread” make each realisation sharp. The title’s old-fashioned spelling, “Anæsthesia,” carries the clinical atmosphere of the hospital scene, but the poem quietly inverts the word’s meaning. Instead of numbness, the speaker experiences a flood of feeling: dread, rapture, love, regret.
What makes the poem significant is its insistence that the past is not really past. It lies dormant in a hospital corridor, in the paper of a letter, in the chemical sweetness of perfume or ether, and a single breath can tear through time. Stringer shows that memory can be both wound and gift: it “stabs” the heart, yet it also restores the beloved’s presence for one ghost-like instant. The poem is called “Anæsthesia,” but its real subject is the opposite of numbness—the raw, sudden, physical return of everything felt long ago.