Thursday, June 24, 2010

The Listeners

(One of my most favourite poems by Walter De La Mare. Best to read it in silence and contemplate.)

“Is anybody there?” said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in silence chomped the grasses,
Of the forest’s ferny floor.

And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the traveler’s head:
And he smote upon the door a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.

But no one descended to the Traveler;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his gray 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 the 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 Traveler’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 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:

Aye, 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.
~Sir Walter De La Mare

So what exactly is this feeling of the existence of 'listeners' inside a surely empty place? I have felt it many times, as if they sit and wait, and hear and reply... with their silence.

2 comments: