Nobody in "Ghost Town" remembers who built the place. That opening admission sets the poem's quiet, unsentimental tone: the houses on the mountainside outlast the knowledge of their own makers. What follows is a portrait of abandonment, but also a meditation on how thoroughly human effort can be erased. Gold made the town, gold left it, and the poem suggests that the people who chased it were never really committed to the place at all. When "the last bright yellow grain" gives up its sparkle, "men sought other dreams." The town was never a home so much as a stopover on the way to the next hope.
The poem's most striking technique is personification, and it is handled with restraint. The windows are "broken and blank," arranged "rank on rank," like a silent army of watchers. They "stare vacantly," and their "empty eyes" are never lit by fire at night. In the second stanza the negatives pile up: "No fires," "No friendly faces." The buildings have been given faces precisely so that the poem can show us what they are missing. Nothing in this stanza is described by what is there; everything is defined by absence, which is exactly how a ghost town feels to a visitor.
Sound plays a quiet but important role. Silence "fills the hollows of the hills," a phrase that makes silence into a substance, something that pours into empty spaces the way laughter once did. Laughter "lived and died" in the first stanza, a compact verb pair that covers the whole life of the town in a handful of syllables. Later the wind "goes by as if it were a sigh," so the only sound left is a borrowed human one, a sigh with nobody to sigh it.
Structurally, the poem is made of four quatrains with a regular rhyme scheme, the second and fourth lines rhyming (hillside/died, lanes/panes, beams/dreams) while the first and third lines are linked by sound inside the lines themselves. Look at how often the poet chains words together by repeated sounds: "Gold built this town that Time has tumbled down," where the hard d and t consonants thud like falling timber. "Broken and blank" does the same with its b's. The effect is a musical, almost chant-like quality, as though the poem were a slow elegy being recited over the ruins. The rhythm is steady and unhurried, built on a regular beat, which suits a subject where nothing is happening and everything has already happened.
The final stanza is where the poem turns from description to prophecy, and it contains its loveliest image: "The sun spins golden coins in the air." Gold, the town's whole reason for existing, returns here as pure light, free and worthless, tossed around by the sun with no one to collect it. It is a gentle irony. The wealth that once drew men up the mountain is now scattered about for nothing. Notice, too, that the stanza does not quite keep to the poem's earlier pattern. Its rhymes are looser, the line about the sun is a little shorter in feel than its neighbours, and the ending arrives with a sort of shrug. That slight loosening can be read as the poem itself relaxing into inevitability.
The conclusion is not violent or dramatic. A tree will grow, and it "will not be too long" before it "hides each faint mark that Man was ever there." The capital M in "Man" and the earlier capital in "Time" turn both into abstract forces, one the builder of ambitions, the other their patient undoer. Nature does not destroy the town in anger; it simply covers it over.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to mourn loudly. It does not blame anyone, and it does not pretend the miners were villains or heroes. It observes that human settlements are temporary, that memory is shorter than timber, and that even something as hard and shining as gold cannot guarantee that anyone will remember us. The poem leaves the reader standing in a lane full of grass, looking at windows that look back at nothing, and quietly wondering what our own towns will look like when the wind is the only one left to sigh over them.