'The Listeners' by Walter de la Mare

The Listeners


‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking at the moonlit door:
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor;
And a bird flew out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head;
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed seal
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelled in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight,
To that voice from the world of men;
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness.
Their stillness answered his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head;-
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word’, he said,
Never the least stir made the listeners;
Though every word he spoke
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake,
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of the iron and the stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.




What I Feel

   Walter de la Mare was influenced by Coleridge’s supernaturalism--the creation of a hair-raising atmosphere with the use of simple words, absence of cheap sort of Gothic horror-elements, like bloody activities, horrible-looking ghosts or loathsome zombies. Nevertheless, de la Mare's poems have their own charm. ‘The Listeners’ is one of his best creations. The description of a moonlit night, with its perplexing chiaroscuro, aptly creates an eerie background. The traveller's night-visit in the deserted house in forest is shrouded in mystery. The use of silence is remarkable. The poem perhaps exemplifies the poet’s attempt to bridge the two worlds--that of living beings and that of non-living beings (or phantoms). In spite of both of their curiosity it proved to be a failure, because the gulf between them can not be bridged.