Two Apparitions by Seán Hewitt
My March Poem of the Month is Seán Hewitt’s Two Apparitions, which was published in Issue 05 of Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. It is a poem that has resonated with me recently as it explores similar themes to that which I am writing about, including ghosts, death, loss, grief. It’s a poem that speaks to a lot of my own feelings towards these topics and does so in a way that is both beautiful and haunting.
The poem is told in two parts, each part centring on separate but related incidents of apparitions. In the first part, the speaker describes seeing their father in the bathroom mirror. The strangeness of the encounter is attributed to dreaming (“I thought that I had woken / from the dream; but […]”); it is logical to think that when you see the ghost of a dead person it is within a dream. Often, I think we assume that seeing a dead relative or friend in a dream, or hallucinating them is something that is comforting. We assume they are there to watch over us, to let us know that everything is okay, that they are at peace. But in reality, I think the idea is terrifying. To see in front of you someone you know you should not be able to see, is something I would be frightened to witness. And the speaker of the poem expresses fear in what they see, a dream which is more nightmarish as they clamp their eyes shut, unable to speak.
In the second half of the poem, the speaker becomes the ghost. As a ghost, they are able to experience the world as though they are the one coming to comfort the living. We often imagine ghosts as longing to reconnect with the world as they did when they were alive, and this is what is described by the speaker:
the morning station where we met
in gold and filtered light.
I remember the exact
weight of him, the warmth
of his cheek touching mine—
The structure of the poem echos the line “Two worlds overlaid” at the beginning of the third stanza of part I, the overlaying of the real world with the spirit world. There is a continued reference to duality that hold the two parts together. In the second section, the speaker describes themselves as the ghost “caught on the wrong side / of the dream.” This twoness is emphasised by the two characters in the poem, the speaker and the father. The stanzas are arranged in regular groups of three lines, as though they represent the speaker and their father, with a line dividing them, separating them from each other’s worlds. The mood of the poem also shifts in the second half. The anguish and fear from the first section become “all happiness, all peace” in the second. There is “gold and filtered light” which contracts with the “stark light” from the first part. But the poem is cyclical, it comes back to emotions expressed in part I, the speaker crying at the foot of the bed as the speaker tries to get back to his father in the place they had been happy. I like the way the poem ends of a kind of final release:
as though I might—by force
of myself—go free.
It has a slight ambiguity to it and seems to suggest that perhaps the speaker would like to join the father on the other side, the wrong side. There is a desperation there in the way the speaker is described as tearing their way back to him, and the forcefulness of which they do this.
Read the full poem here.
