The Ghost of Christmas Present (Dickens’ A Christmas Carol) has beneath his robe, two children: a boy named Ignorance and a girl named Want. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows to Scrooge the effects of deeds and thoughts toward mankind.
The following Coleridge poem, Phantom, might also be the deciding factor of how Scrooge conducts his future self. What would Scrooge’s self-portrait look like before and after his ghostly experiences?
PHANTOM
All look and likeness caught from earth
All accident of kin and birth,
Had pass’d away. There was no trace
Of aught on that illumined face,
Uprais’d beneath the rifted stone
But of one spirit all her own;–
She, she herself, and only she,
Shone through her body visibly.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Reflect:
What would we look like if what we did and what we thought created our appearance, and not the looks of our parents or any physical accidents? What would be the pictures of our inmost selves?
For Further Reading: (reference – synonyms)
Long ago, ghost meant simply the spirit (or soul) in a living person. Gradually it came to mean the spirit without the body. So now ghost is the wandering spirit of a dead person. An apparition simply appears before people and is seen. A spector carries a special feeling of evil or danger. A phantom could be a mere trick of the imagination.
Read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, and decide which synonym could be properly used to describe the headless horseman that pursued Ichabod Crane. Which one would Ichabod, himself, be most likely to use?
“Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.” ~George Eliot
PMCBurkey