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.
Walter John de la Mare, (25 April 1873 � 22 June 1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist. He is probably best remembered for his works for children and for his poem "The Listeners". He also wrote some subtle psychological horror stories, amongst them "Seaton's Aunt" and "Out of the Deep". His 1921 novel Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and his post-war Collected Stories for Children won the 1947 Carnegie Medal for British children's books.
