John Freeman (1880–1929), an English poet and critic associated with the Georgian poetry anthologies of the early twentieth century, wrote in a period when many lyric poets prized clear speech, traditional stanza shapes, and the supernatural as a way into psychological feeling. “The Call” is exactly that kind of poem: a night piece in which wind, trees, walls, and a candle become charged with dread and longing.
At first the poem seems to be asking a simple question about a noise outside. Is it “the wind that stirs the trees” or “the trees that scratch the wall”? Freeman then sharpens the question with the phrase “a dumb ghost’s call”—an almost contradictory image, a silent ghost that nevertheless summons. The central idea emerges in the final stanza, when the speaker asks whether what he heard was “Love’s last, ghostly call.” The haunting is not just an intruder at the door; it is the memory of love, or of a beloved, returning with ghostly force. The phrase “this night of all” appears twice, suggesting a private anniversary or a moment when loneliness becomes unusually acute.
Freeman’s construction is deliberately incantatory. The opening and closing stanzas almost mirror each other, with their anaphoric questions: “Is it the wind... Is it the trees... Is it the wall...” The second and fourth lines rhyme regularly—wall with call, all, tall, fall—so that the wall itself becomes a recurring boundary, both physical and psychological. At the end of each third line, “mutters” or “muttered” recurs, giving the night a low, half-human voice. Most lines move in four stresses, creating the pulse of a whispered charm or ballad, but the imperative “Open!” breaks that rhythm sharply, as if something is beating against the meter as well as the door.
The imagery is intimate and concrete. A candle is twirled by the wind, branches heave against the house, hands beat “door and wall,” and the speaker rises as “a shape and shadow tall,” becoming ghostlike himself. As the poem progresses, the space narrows. The speaker crosses the room, crouches “by the wall,” bolts the door three times, and finally loses the light: “The light’s out, and I shrink / Quaking and blind against the wall.” The ritual of bolting fails because the voice no longer needs to come from outside. In the penultimate stanza, “no sound is, yet it mutters / Within me now, this night of all.” The call has moved indoors, inside the body. That inward turn is the poem’s real shock. The repeated “Open!” is not only a demand to enter; it also asks the speaker to open himself to loss, to memory, to the possibility that love leaves a ghost behind.
What makes “The Call” significant is its psychological precision beneath the gothic surface. It understands how grief or longing can turn a windy night into a voice, and how closing a door cannot keep out what already lives “within.” The final question remains open because Freeman refuses to choose between wind, tree, wall, and ghost. The scarier answer is that love itself has become ghostly—a last call that continues to sound in the very place where we live alone.