Faust - Analysis

The phantom as the engine of the show

The poem keeps insisting that what makes the opera happen is not plot or heroine but a recurring absence: the phantom. The opening wish, If only the phantom would stop reappearing!, sounds like impatience with a nuisance, yet the next lines reveal a deeper dependency. Business… was punk at the opera, the heroine has vanished from Faust, and the crowd strolled sadly away. In that drained atmosphere, the phantom is the only attentive presence left, watching from the roof, and the poem offers a paradoxical diagnosis: hungers / That must be stirred before disappointment can begin. Disappointment isn’t the end of desire here; it’s the condition that lets desire start up in a meaningful way. The phantom is the thing that returns to keep that loop alive.

Hunger turns from feeling into workplace talk

Ashbery’s opera house isn’t only a dreamscape; it’s also a place of labor, money, and management, and that is where the poem’s hungers first become strangely concrete. A man in brown with a yellow vest is talking hungers / With the silver-haired director on a green-carpeted floor. Hunger becomes a meeting topic, like budgets or scheduling—an odd reduction that makes desire feel both omnipresent and bureaucratically handled. Even the phantom, in this daytime scene, takes an impersonal form: not a figure but yellow squares of sunlight, compared to those in Faust. The poem keeps sliding between the supernatural and the ordinary, as if to say the ghostliness isn’t a special effect; it’s built into how the opera runs and how people negotiate what they want.

When darkness threatens, the phantom becomes a policing idea

The third stanza tightens the mood. The musicians are about to strike lest darkness begin / In the corridors, and the consequence of that darkness is not merely inconvenience but the phantom’s freedom: through dim passages he could Glide unobstructed. That phrasing makes the phantom feel less like a character and more like a principle that gains power when oversight collapses. At the same time, another vision reappearing cuts through: blond Marguerite practicing at her window. This rehearsal awakens terrible new hungers / In the already starving tenor. The tension is sharp: the opera house is on the edge of economic breakdown, yet the artistic image of Marguerite at a window can still detonate longing in someone who is already depleted. Desire here doesn’t respect practicality; it feeds on scarcity.

Faust drifts: the bargain is no longer just a story

Midway through, the poem almost shrugs at its own obsession: hungers / Are just another topic. But the casual tone is undercut by the eerie redefinition of Faust himself—no longer a stable protagonist, but the new Faust / Drifting through the tunnels of the opera. The question in parentheses, In search of lost old age?, flips the usual Faustian direction. Instead of chasing youth, this Faust seems to want what time normally takes away: age, consequence, an earned self. Yet what reappearing behind him is cold daylight, and even the daylight is called a phantom. That twist suggests that clarity and truth—what daylight stands for—are also unstable in this world. The opera house produces reality as a series of returns: each thing is most itself when it comes back, slightly wrong, like a memory that keeps updating.

A painted window and the hunger of unpaid artists

One of the poem’s most telling moments is when the phantom is revealed to have a workforce: Window, painted by the phantom / Scene painters who are sick of not getting paid. The supernatural is literally manufactured, and the poem lets that fact sit beside the older, more romantic idea of haunting. Hungers here are not only erotic or metaphysical; they are also the straightforward hunger of workers whose wages are missing. And yet the stage picture they create is delicate and repeated: tiny, reappearing / Dancers, a sandbag falling through purple air. Even a dangerous accident becomes part of the score, falling like a note in Faust. The spectators, meanwhile, begin / To understand something bloody and star-like about the tenor—the bleeding tenor star. Art becomes a system that converts actual strain (unpaid labor, physical risk, emotional depletion) into spectacle, then asks the audience to call it understanding.

The night of ovation: appetite, coercion, and the word Begin!

When the opera finally fills up again—crowded to the rafters—it does so on the back of the phantom’s success: Took twenty-nine curtain calls. The crowd chants Begin! / Begin!, a word that has been haunting the poem all along. It can sound like excitement, but it also feels like pressure: a demand that the machine restart, that longing be re-staged on command. In the wings, the tenor hungers / For the heroine’s convulsive kiss, a description that makes desire sound almost medical, involuntary, even violent. Faust, too, changes: he Moves forward, no longer young. This is a crucial turn in the poem’s logic. Earlier, disappointment had to begin before hunger could begin; now youth has to end—or at least stop being the costume—for the action to proceed. The opera advances when it admits time and damage.

A last reappearance that cancels the need for reappearing

The ending proposes an impossible-sounding resolution: Faust reappears for the last time, and the poem claims the opera would no longer need its phantom. After so much returning, the idea of a final return feels like both a promise and a contradiction. What replaces the phantom is not fullness but exposure: On the bare, sunlit stage, the hungers could begin. The stage is no longer dressed up in corridor-darkness or painted windows; it is bare and lit. The poem’s central claim crystallizes here: the phantom was a way of organizing desire through deferral, disappointment, and spectacle. Once that apparatus falls away, hunger doesn’t end—it finally starts in earnest, without the alibi of haunting.

One unnerving question the poem leaves open

If the phantom is no longer needed, what exactly have the people been applauding for twenty-nine curtain calls? The poem flirts with the idea that audiences (and performers) prefer the ghost that manages disappointment to the daylight that forces desire to stand on a bare stage. In that sense, the scariest phantom isn’t in the corridors at all; it’s the habit of needing something to reappear so we don’t have to begin.