Dhan Gopal Mukerji knew what it meant to live at a distance from home. Born near Calcutta in 1890, he moved to the United States in the early twentieth century and wrote in English at a time when Indian voices in Western literary circles were still rare. That sense of standing between worlds, with the past pressing on the present, gives “Ghosts” its quiet intensity. The poem is not about supernatural visitors; it is about the way memory can make the living feel like shadows.
In the opening stanza, two people—perhaps lovers—sit before a fire. The flames are immediately transformed into metaphor: they flicker “as memories on the hearth of life.” That image sets the poem’s double vision. A fire should suggest warmth and home, but these flames are unstable, and the people watching them are “Two shadows... watching, brooding.” They try “to catch our reflection / In a non-existent stream.” A stream would normally return an image, a sense of self or connection. Here there is no stream, so looking becomes hollow. They are present in body but absent in substance, already ghostly.
The second stanza turns to the clock, called “the ghost-witness of it all.” Usually a clock measures time neutrally; here it “brings its proofs,” as if testifying against the couple. The phrase “moments melt into moments” captures time’s unsettling fluidity, and Mukerji extends it through two similes: the melting is “like notes of sad music” and “like a white cerement.” A cerement is a burial cloth, so passing time is tied to mourning and death. The soft alliteration and long vowel sounds in “notes of sad music” make the line feel like a sigh, while the stark whiteness of the cerement adds a chill.
That chill deepens in the final stanza. “Cold memories shroud our life,” the speaker says, picking up the burial imagery and making memory a shroud that covers the present. Speech, the thing that might connect two people, “flees before this.” Faces turn away from each other, and yet the fire keeps throwing light on them. That light does not bring clarity or reunion; it only reveals that “there, too, flames burn and flicker.” The outer fire and the inner life mirror each other, both alive enough to move but not steady enough to warm. The poem closes with a return to flickering, so the couple seems caught in a loop of fading attention and dying feeling.
The poem’s structure reinforces that mood. It is built of three five-line stanzas with no regular rhyme scheme, which keeps the language from feeling decorative or resolved. The lines move slowly, broken by commas in “Two shadows we, watching, brooding,” as if silence itself interrupts the voice. Mukerji also uses enjambment in “To catch our reflection / In a non-existent stream” to make the search feel incomplete. The repeated word “shroud” changes from a noun-like image in “white cerement” to a verb in “Cold memories shroud,” so death becomes an action rather than a thing. Even the title, “Ghosts,” applies less to apparitions than to the speaker and companion, their faces lit but their connection spectral.
The poem is significant because it gives early Indian English poetry a spare, modern voice. Mukerji did not need exotic scenery or dramatic events; he used a fireplace, a clock, and two silent faces to create an atmosphere of haunting. In doing so, he captured a feeling that crosses cultures: the sense that time can turn intimacy into estrangement and make strangers of people who once shared the same flame.