The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
"The Listeners" is a poem by Walter de la Mare that explores themes of isolation, mystery, and the unknown. In this thirty-six line piece, the narrative begins with a traveler who arrives at a deserted, moonlit house in a forest, where he knocks and calls out, seeking engagement but receiving no response. The focus of the poem shifts from the traveler to the silent, unseen listeners within the house, suggesting a deeper, perhaps supernatural presence. The setting is characterized by a sense of estrangement, as the traveler grapples with feelings of perplexity and loneliness, while nature remains unaffected and indifferent to his plight.
De la Mare employs simple language and repetition to evoke an eerie, contemplative mood, highlighting the contrast between the mundane and the strange. The poem's rhythm contributes to a sense of urgency and anxiety, drawing readers into the tension of the scene. As the traveler departs, the readers are left with lingering questions about the promise he came to fulfill and the silent listeners who remain, deepening the poem's exploration of human connection and the mysteries of existence. The work invites reflection on the solitude of the human experience and the spectral echoes that may linger in places once inhabited.
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The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
First published: 1912, in The Listeners and Other Poems
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“The Listeners” is a single-stanza poem of thirty-six lines, rhyming abcb. The title suggests the focus of the poem: It is not on the poem’s human traveler, but on the phantom listeners who await him. The poem is written in the third person, to allow the reader to observe, objectively, the traveler first and then the listeners, and to remain behind with the listeners when the traveler hastily departs at the poem’s close.
The poem begins in medias res, with the traveler knocking on a moonlit door in an unknown place. It is this sense of the unknown, with all its ambiguities, that controls the tone and mood of the poem. The place in the forest where the traveler finds himself is deserted and overgrown with brambles; the sense of isolation and strangeness causes the lonely human visitor first to knock on the door of the turreted house, then to smite it, and finally to smite it even louder, as his cries receive no response.
One soon discovers, however, that it is only he who is perplexed and lonely in this nighttime scene; nature ignores the phantoms, as is seen by his horse contentedly champing the grasses and by the bird in the house’s turret being disturbed, not by anything eerie or frightening in the natural scene, but by his voice and loud knocking. The scene reinforces one of Walter de la Mare’s common themes: Human beings are estranged from both the natural and the social worlds, and are puzzled and even frightened by the unfathomable mystery at the heart of life.
This sense of mystery is deepened by the power of hints and suggestions—in Wallace Stevens’s terms, of innuendos and inflections. Why is the traveler here? Evidently to keep some promise, perhaps to those who are no longer alive, since he is “the one man left awake” (line 32). Something, though, has caused him to come to this lonely and isolated place in the middle of the night and compelled him to cry out repeatedly to a deserted house, without entering to see for himself who or what might be there.
De la Mare builds on the paradoxes and ironies inherent in the situation, opposing the “lonely” traveler to the “lone” house, and his standing “still” because he is perplexed and wondering to the “phantom listeners” who are “still” in the sense of being quiet (and perhaps dead). Yet even while the traveler feels in his heart their strangeness and stillness, his horse continues to crop the “dark turf,” naturally oblivious to these human fears.
The poem ends with a shift in focus from the lonely traveler to the silent listeners; while he rushes to flee the scene, they remain behind in the returning silence. De la Mare’s effort to coalesce verbal sounds and verbal symbols is nowhere more evident than in this poem, and especially in the soft sibilance of the s sounds in the final lines. Though the traveler has departed, readers are left wondering what has happened to those to whom he has made a promise as well as what this promise might be.
Forms and Devices
De la Mare uses several poetic strategies to make “The Listeners” effective. His language, for example, is quite simple and ordinary, an apt contrast to the strange and eerie quality of the setting. None of his words causes a reader to search out their meanings in a dictionary; it is as if he wants to convince readers that the world he is portraying is the actual world in which they live. With the exception, perhaps, of the turret on the house, none of the concrete details is exotic or arcane. The strangeness, in other words, is in the atmosphere created by the mind of the traveler, not in ordinary reality.
The repetition of words is also effective: knocking, still and stillness, and listening are prominent. There is a general absence of metaphor and simile as well; it is the language of the setting itself, dark, empty, still, listening, which creates a mood of sadness, loneliness, and emptiness.
It is perhaps the rhythm, however, which is the most striking stylistic component: de la Mare uses a basically anapestic rhythm (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable), more commonly used in rollicking ballads or sea chanteys, to communicate a sense of urgency and anxiety in the situation. Indeed, for many readers, it is difficult to be left behind in the forest at the poem’s end. When the traveler leaves, one wishes to leave with him, rather than to stay behind with the phantom listeners.