A ghost does not have to be a person; in Sarojini Naidu’s lyric the ghost is a dream. The speaker turns to face a “dead dream” that has returned after “seven aeons,” and her response is not nostalgia but refusal. The poem is an exorcism, an urgent attempt to send an old hope or grief back to its grave before it can trouble a life that has been carefully rebuilt. Its central tension lies in the possessive “my”: the dream belongs to her, yet she treats it as an intruder, and the poem’s energy comes from that double claim.
Naidu shapes the poem as direct address, so the reader overhears a quarrel between the self and its own past. It opens with startled recognition: “Have you found me, at last, O my Dream?” The “O” turns the line into a kind of invocation, but the questions that follow are hostile. The speaker asks “Who bade you awake from your sleep,” as if the dream’s return needs an explanation and a culprit. The repeated phrase “seven aeons ago” pushes the burial into mythic time, while the short line “Seven aeons ago” drops like a bell between longer, chant-like lines. The couplet rhymes—snow/ago, leaves/eaves, priest/feast, depart/heart—give the poem a ritual, song-like control, even as the speaker’s alarm rises. That ceremonial quality matters because the poem is less a confession than a rite of banishment.
The imagery splits cleanly between the dream’s grave-world and the speaker’s living world. The dream was buried “deep under forests of snow,” a place of cold, silence and remoteness. It has tracked her “beyond the cerulean foam of the deep,” crossing a beautiful but immense distance. By contrast, the speaker’s present life is imagined as a house that is also a temple: there are lintels, eaves, sacred green garlands of leaves, white nested wild pigeons, a priest’s robes and the “chantings of love” at a feast. The pigeons are especially telling—wild yet nested, free yet at home. The returning dream threatens all of this with its deadness: its “dead fingers” would defile the priest’s robes, and its “dim moan” would be woven into the feast’s music. The verbs are acts of violation: tear, scare, defile, weave. The speaker does not merely dislike the dream’s return; she experiences it as contagion entering sanctified space.
The most revealing image arrives near the end. The dream, she says, must go back “Where a heart-riven child hid you once.” That phrase exposes the origin of the burial: it was done by a child whose heart had been split open. The adult speaker has not erased that wound. Instead, she has raised “shrines” in “the clefts of my heart.” The word “clefts” suggests cracks or scars, so the shrines are built inside the very places where the heart was broken. This turns healing into a form of consecration. What the returning dream threatens, therefore, is not merely happiness but something harder-won: a sacred order created from pain. The final command, “Profane not the shrines I have raised,” is both a defense and a definition of selfhood.
The poem’s significance lies in its unsentimental view of memory. It does not treat every old dream as a treasure to be recovered; some dreams must stay buried for the person to survive. Naidu makes that insight vivid by turning the inner life into a visible, tactile place of garlands, birds, robes and altars. The result is a lyric that feels both intimate and ceremonial—a private argument conducted in the language of worship.