“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveler
Thinking Out of School
In my getting-in-touch email, I gave a list of ambitious topics I plan to write about. For today, however, I want to start with something less ambitious—simply sharing a favorite poem that I’ve discussed with my students many times over the years, Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners” (1912).1
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) was widely admired for his poems, ghost stories, and works for children. He was a prophet of the strangeness of the imagination and a great compiler of dreams as bearers of deeply buried “wild and ancient” truth. (Freud, he believed, offered only a “degraded,” de-spiritualized, and too simple account of dreams and the unconscious.) In “The Listeners,” de la Mare takes after his Victorian forbears like Tennyson and Browning as well as Edwardian contemporaries like Kipling and Conrad in offering an image of masculine stoicism—the “lonely Traveler” on horseback whose word binds him to an absolute moral obligation and who is anxious for his faithfulness to be recognized even in failure. I love the poem (and find it timely) as a portrayal of intense listening even across the most forbidding boundaries, and for the profundity of the silence it fosters, so distant from our highly stimulated world. Is communication possible between one being, one realm, and another? Is there anyone out there listening? If so, who are they?
You can read “The Listeners” below or listen to it read by my friend Anthony Kemp, Associate Professor of English at USC, whose kind help I gratefully acknowledge. After the poem I’ve given a brief hint about De la Mare’s attitude toward poetry and its meaning.
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.If you are left wondering at the mystery of this poem, the author suggests an approach.
A poem’s supreme significance, like that of a child or a bird or a loved one or a saint, is purely its own beautiful pregnant self….If poetry most closely approaches music when it is most poetic, when its sounds…and when its rhythms, rather than the words themselves, are its real if cryptic language, any other meaning, however valuable it may be, is only a secondary matter.2
Walter de la Mare, The Listeners and Other Poems (London: Constable & Co., 1926).
Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer!: Of Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the Imagination, Divination, the Artist and Kindred Subjects (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), p. 103.
Gave me chills! Your intro is an on-ramp to feeling.