A Favourite Of Mine

I have loved poetry ever since I was a small child. This one I first read when I was about ten and it has stayed with me ever since. I love the air of mystery around it, love the fact that each time you read it you can conjure up different mental images in your mind and put your own story to it.

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 work 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.

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What thoughts this poem conjures up. An isolated house in the middle of the forest, deserted, abandoned.  Who was the Traveller?  What promise had he made that had to be kept? Had he been away for many years, had his family died whilst he was away?  Had they fled for some unknown reason? Was he coming back to find a lost love but if so why the "tell them I came"?  He had expected to find people there and was perplexed not to. Perhaps he was the messenger for some dark plot that had been hatched. The reader simply knows that the house is empty of human life, peopled only by ghosts but the reason is left to the imagination. I also wonder what happened to the Traveller after he rode away.  Yes, I love the intrigue and mystery about this beautiful poem which has long been and will always remain, one of my favourites.

 

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