“I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight, / The manifold, soft chimes, / That fill the haunted chambers of the night, / Like some old poet’s rhymes.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from “A Hymn To The Night.”
The mind is a mysterious, wonderful thing. It is the storehouse of every living moment we’ve experienced. It also keeps all manner of bric-a-brac originally intended to have only ephemeral value, like the lyrics to a ridiculous song from our youth. That song is stored right there alongside the major milestones of our lives. As the years pass, and we want to draw upon something worth remembering, we may be unable to summon the pertinent details. Those lyrics? They keep coming back with the most frustrating clarity.
There are memories we would most like to put away, as one would store old photos in a shoebox on the top shelf of a closet, in behind old clothes we no longer wear. The problem is that the shoebox keeps tumbling down, spilling the contents in front of us. Out come old faces of lost loves, harsh words said in the heat of the moment, and regrettable actions we wish we could turn back time to correct. They keep coming back at the most inopportune times to torment us as well, like those lyrics from that old song. They will make us toss and turn in the dark as we ponder over what was, what could have been, and why it had to end.
Night is the time when the ghost-like images of Lovers and Other Strangers haunt the dark corners just beyond our beds, calling out to us from years gone by.
Thomas Moorewrote, “Oft in the stilly night, / Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, / Fond memory brings the light / Of other days around me; / The smiles, the tears, / Of boyhood’s years, / The words of love then spoken; / The eyes that shone / Now dimmed and gone, / The cheerful hearts now broken.”
Thomas Moore also wrote, “And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, / Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.”
It’s one thing to occasionally remember the people who have passed through our lives, the ones who played an important role, and quite another to be obsessed with them night after night. And yet that is exactly what some of us do long after the closet has been emptied of their clothes, and they are no longer physically there. That’s when the haunting begins…
There is no easy answer to rid ourselves of these phantoms of memory. We hope that the passage of time will make their visits less frequent and dim their recriminations. In the meantime, we’ll try to make peace with ourselves and live with the decisions we’ve made. We will then welcome their visits as a temporary stay. Eventually we’ll discover what it takes to finally close the chapter they occupied and move on to a new cast of characters. At that point, the hauntings will most likely stop and we’ll have assigned them a new place to occupy in our minds. Let’s hope that it’s a place that won’t be as easy to access as the song that keeps playing over and over again.
This is a poem called “Midsummer” by Sydney King Russell, featured in the collection Best Loved Poems of The American People, published in 1936 by Doubleday.
“You loved me for a little, / Who could not love me for long; / You gave me wings of gladness / And lent my spirit song. / You loved me for an hour / But only with your eyes; / Your lips I could not capture / By storm or by surprise. / Your mouth that I remember / With rush of sudden pain / As one remembers starlight / Or roses after rain./ Out of a world of laughter / Suddenly I am sad. / Day and night it haunts me, / The kiss I never had.”
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Don Jackson
