The House Is You
Every Thursday, I post a poetry-writing prompt here on the site. This weekly tradition is designed to help you explore new ideas, experiment with different writing techniques, and expand your literary horizons. My aim is to provide you with thought-provoking themes, intriguing images, or captivating wordplay that will stimulate your artistic senses. You are free to interpret the prompt in any way you like and express yourself through poetry or creative writing.
It's nearly Halloween, so this week we're writing a ghost story. But not the kind with a rattling chain and a white sheet in the corridor.
Emily Dickinson wrote a poem arguing that you don't need a haunted house to be haunted — the mind has its own corridors, and the thing waiting at the end of them is far worse than any external ghost, because it is you. She suggested that a person could bolt every door and arm themselves against any intruder, and still be ambushed by what was already inside, sitting in the dark, patient, familiar.
That is the scariest poem anyone has ever written, and it doesn't contain a single monster.
The Poet Who Haunted Her Own House
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830 and died there in 1886, having spent most of her adult life within the grounds of her family's home. She grew increasingly private over the years, dressed in white, and conducted a great deal of her social life through letters passed under doors and lowered in baskets to the children below her window.
Fewer than a dozen of her poems appeared in print during her lifetime, and those were altered by editors who thought her punctuation was a mistake. After her death, her sister Lavinia opened a chest and found nearly eighteen hundred poems, many of them hand-stitched into little homemade booklets. It took until the middle of the twentieth century for an edition to appear that restored her dashes and her strange capital letters — the very things we now recognize as the sound of her voice.
She wrote constantly about death, and she wrote about it with a cool, curious intimacy that nobody since has matched. She rides in a carriage with Death as though he were a gentleman caller. She lies in her own grave and chats with the man buried in the next room over. She describes a funeral taking place inside her own skull, the mourners pacing back and forth until the floor of reason gives way beneath her.
Here is the thing to understand about Dickinson's gothic: she is not describing supernatural events. She is describing grief, dread, depression, and the terrible privacy of a mind alone with itself — and the ghost story is simply the most accurate language available for it.
A practical note for fellow bloggers: Dickinson's work is in the public domain, so unlike most of the poets in this series, you may quote her freely in your own posts.
The Dickinson Essence
Emily Dickinson's poetry is built on a few recognizable foundations:
Hymn meter — most of her poems are written in common meter, the four-line hymn stanza that alternates eight syllables and six, which is why so many of them can be sung to familiar church tunes; she poured unholy content into the holiest container she had
The dash — her dashes are not punctuation so much as breath, hesitation, and the sound of a thought stopping short of itself
Slant rhyme — she rhymes shut with thought, stone with man, deliberately just off-key, so the poem never quite settles
Capitalized abstractions — Death, Fear, Hope, and Despair appear as capitalized entities, less like concepts than like visitors with coats and names
Interior architecture — the mind in her work is a house with rooms, cellars, corridors, and locked doors, and something is always moving through it
The unnamed terror — she almost never says what the frightening thing is; she describes the furniture around it and lets you supply the shape
Notice the structure: she takes the smallest, most orderly form available — a hymn stanza — and puts something in it that will not sit still.
This Week's Prompt: The Haunted House Is You
Today, I invite you to write the Halloween poem Emily Dickinson would recognize: a haunting with no ghost in it.
Write a poem in which your own mind is the haunted house. Use four-line stanzas in rough hymn meter — eight syllables, then six, then eight, then six. Use dashes instead of most of your commas and periods. Capitalize two abstractions and treat them as guests who come and go. And never once name the frightening thing directly.
Getting Started
- Map the house. Before writing, sketch your mind as architecture. Which room is shut? What's in the cellar? Which hallway do you avoid at night? Who has a key? Be specific the way you'd be specific about a real house.
- Count on your fingers. Eight syllables, six, eight, six. It will feel mechanical for the first stanza and then it will start carrying you. If you need a cheat, hum "Amazing Grace" — that's the meter, and nearly every Dickinson poem fits over it.
- Replace your punctuation with dashes. Wherever you'd pause, use a dash. Notice how it changes the breathing — how a thought left hanging on a dash feels unfinished on purpose, like someone stopped talking because they heard something upstairs.
- Invite two abstractions in. Capitalize them. Give them behavior, not description: Grief keeps the holidays, Fear only comes in weather, Memory takes the cup and stays. Treat them exactly like houseguests you didn't invite but have stopped arguing with.
- Bend one rhyme on purpose. Find a place to rhyme two words that almost match and don't. The wrongness is the point — a poem that rhymes perfectly feels safe, and this poem should not feel safe.
- Refuse to name it. Whatever is actually haunting you — a loss, a diagnosis, a fear about the future, an old version of yourself — do not say the word. Describe the stairs, the cold spot, the cup set out. The reader will know. Readers always know.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!
A Few Lines to Carry With You
The best Dickinson poems are small enough to fit on the back of an envelope — which is where she wrote a fair number of them — and large enough to rearrange your week. If your draft starts sprawling, cut it to five stanzas and see what survives.
And if this prompt brings something real up the stairs toward you, that's allowed. Dickinson was writing about dread from inside it, not from a safe distance. The hymn meter is there precisely so you have something steady to hold while you look.
The shut room doesn't know it's a poem. The footsteps overhead don't know they're yours. That recognition is yours to bring.
Learn More About Emily Dickinson
You can read a detailed biography at the Poetry Foundation website, and the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst maintains a wonderful online collection.
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin, is the standard scholarly edition, but any complete edition that preserves her dashes and capitalization will do — avoid the old, heavily "corrected" Victorian versions.
For her gothic streak specifically, look up the poems about a funeral in the brain, the carriage ride with Death, and the one about not needing a chamber to be haunted. Read all three out loud, at night, and tell me they aren't scarier than anything on television this week.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!
Here's my own attempt at writing in Emily Dickinson's style:
The Tenant
I keep a Room I do not use — The door is always shut — And still the floorboards overhead Rehearse a nightly Thought —
No Burglar troubles me at all — I bolt the outer Door — Yet One who walks the upper hall Has lived here long before —
October thins the Afternoon — The Lamps go on at four — And Something in the Cellar turns And settles — as before —
I set a cup for Memory — She takes it — and she stays — Fear only comes in Weather — but Grief keeps the Holidays —
I have not climbed to see her face — I know the way she stands — We are too civil now to speak — I will not lift my hands.
