‘Phantasmagoria’ is a poem written by Lewis Carroll and first published in 1869 as the opening poem of a collection of verse by Carroll entitled Phantasmagoria and Other Poems. The collection was also published under the name Rhyme? And Reason? It is Lewis Carroll’s longest poem. Both the poem and the collection were illustrated by A. B. Frost.
‘Phantasmagoria’ is a narrative discussion written in seven cantos between a ghost (a Phantom) and a man named Tibbets. Carroll portrays the ghost as not so different from human beings: although ghosts may jibber and jangle their chains, they, like us, simply have a job to do and that job is to haunt. Just as in our society, in ghost society there is a hierarchy, and ghosts are answerable to the King (who must be addressed as “Your Royal Whiteness”) if they disregard the ‘Maxims of Behaviour”.
Ghosts, our Phantom tells the narrator, fear the same things that we often fear, only sometimes in the reverse:
“Allow me to remark
That ghosts has just as good a right,
In every way to fear the light,
As men to fear the dark.”
Contents
Phantasmagoria — Echoes — A sea dirge — Ye carpette knyghte — Hiawatha’s photographing — Melancholetta — A valentine — The three voices — Tèma con variaziòni — A game of fives — Poeta fit, non nascitur — Size and tears — Atalanta in Camden-town — The lang coortin’ — Four riddles — Fame’s penny-trumpet.