The Listeners
by Walter De La Mare
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up 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 sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt 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 answering 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 spake
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 iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
The Listeners written by the English poet, Walter de la Mare, can be experienced more like a dreamy scene from a twisted story than like a poem. That does not in any way diminish the verse’s lyrical elegance. Under the moonlight, a travelling horseman knocks on a gleaming door and calls out to someone he obviously is acquainted with. His mare shuffles on the forest floor. We can imagine the whole atmosphere. Wild, silent and surreal.
A bird flies over his head and he once again bangs at the door and yells, “Is there anybody there.” And not a soul answers his call. Nobody leans out of the window above to look into his grey eyes ; something he might have expected ‘them’ to do. The disappointment and frustration felt by the traveler leaps out of the page. Nevertheless, the tranquil supernatural beings dwelling in the forlorn abode was listening to the man during the wee hours of the night. They listen to the voice that journeyed from the world of the traveler, the world of the humans. The moonlight rushes on to the stairs that descends to the empty hall and the otherworldly beings pay attention to the man’s call that stirs the serene atmosphere of the lonely place. The horseman surmises that their silence is a queer response and wonders how bizarre these creatures are, as his mare nibbled at the grass on the ground, beneath the heavens embellished with stars.
The horseman loses his composure for the first time and whacks at the door furiously. He hollers at the beings that he has kept his side of the promise and they ought to know that he had come and nobody attended to him. The poet illuminates that there exists a mysterious pact between the traveler and the weird residents of the house. In spite of the commotion created by the man, the preternatural creatures maintain their quietness and listen to the man’s powerful voice reverberating through the shadow infested house. They hear the clank of the stirrups and the clatter of the hoofs. And silence surges as the sound of the hoofs retreat and the poem winds to a close.
The poem is Walter de la Mare’s most successful work in terms of popularity. He was also a well respected writer of short stories and children’s fiction. The most peculiar aspect of the poem is the nature of the relationship between the traveler and the unusual residents of the house. What kind of pact might have they forged? We can only speculate. I imagine that the horseman and his beloved might have been enslaved by the beings, at an ominous juncture in their blissful life. The beings might have demanded that the horseman carry out certain terrible things ( like digging out corpses from their graves and burning them at stakes ) for them in return for his beloved to be set free. The night of the poem, the horseman might have fulfilled his promise and returns to liberate his beloved. The poor horseman is unaware that his beloved had already been transmuted into a supernatural being akin to the residents of the lonely house. The beloved had already left the confines of human existence and will never return to the embrace of the unfortunate horseman. He has been betrayed by the odious creatures and they are quite happy about it, gleefully listening to the desperate cries of the man.
Another matter to ponder is whether the horseman had a real head sitting on his wide shoulders. Is he the Headless Horseman of the Sleepy Hollow who has come down at night to converse with his masters? But then how does he call out without a tongue and a head to ensconce the tongue in. We can only speculate.
The Tomb 