Invocation
Invocation - meaning Summary
Calling a Lost Friend
The poem presents a grieving speaker who invokes the shade of a dead friend, imagining nocturnal returns from graveyards. The voice asks the beloved to appear in any form—a star, a wind, or an apparition—primarily to reassure mutual love and continued fidelity. The speaker explicitly rejects revenge or morbid curiosity about the coffin; the appeal is intimate and mournful, a plea for presence and confirmation of enduring attachment rather than explanation or justice.
Read Complete AnalysesIf all this true, that at the night, when the living men are sleeping, and from a sky, a pale moonlight to stones of graveyards are slipping, If true, that under cover, black, the dead ones leave their coffins, quiet, I call the shade of my beloved: To me, my friend, come back, come back! Appear! Oh, beloved shade, such as you were at last partition, such pale and cold, as winter, late, with face deformed by last infliction. Come, like a star from distant track, like puff of wind or sound's fiction, or like the awful apparition, it's same to me: come back, come back! I call you not because I tend a hurt to men, whose fierce hatred had killed my dear gentle friend, or to cognize the Coffin, sacred, And not because the doubts break sometimes my heart -- but only here, to say that, yet, I love, my dear, that, yet, I'm yours: come back, come back!
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