Walter de la Mare: The Listeners

·       Occupation: English poet, short story writer, and novelist, widely known for his contributions to children’s literature.

·       Distinctive Literary Style:

o   Blended imagination, mysticism, and the supernatural.

o   Often explored dreams, memory, childhood fantasy, and psychological depth.

o   Known for evoking a sense of mystery and the transcendent in his works.

Imagination Theory

·       De la Mare identified two types of imagination:

o   Childlike imagination:

§  Defined by spontaneity, vision, and freedom from rigid perception.

§  Children are “not bound in by their groping senses”, seeing reality as malleable and full of possibilities.

§  This phase is introspective and visionary, allowing children to dwell in pure imaginative landscapes.

o   Boylike imagination:

§  Emerges as societal pressures influence perception, shifting toward an intellectual and analytical approach.

§  The childlike imagination retreats, much like a snail withdrawing into its shell when confronted by reality.

§  By adulthood, individuals either lose their childlike imagination forever or embrace it with greater resilience.

Major Literary Contributions

·       Children’s Literature:

o   His first significant work, Songs of Childhood (1902), introduced him as a major figure in children’s literature.

o   Published fiction, poetry, and anthologies celebrated for their lyrical quality and dreamlike storytelling.

·       Supernatural Fiction:

o   Apart from poetry, he wrote two supernatural novels:

§  Henry Brocken (1904) – A hallucinatory journey through literature and history.

§  The Return (1910) – A psychological ghost story exploring identity and possession.

Themes in His Poetry

·       Dreams & Reality: His works explore the blurred boundaries between waking life and dreams.

·       Death & Transcendence: Often concerned with mortality, the afterlife, and mystical experiences.

·       Rare Mental States: Explores unusual emotional and psychological conditions.

·       Fantasy & Childhood: His literature evokes a world of visionary innocence, deeply tied to childhood imagination.

The rhyming lines are 2 and 4, 6 and 8, 10 and 12, 14 and 16, and so on. All the rhymes are masculine rather than feminine. In masculine rhyme, only the last syllable of one line rhymes with the last syllable of another line, as in lines 2 and 4 (door and floor) and 6 and 8 (head and said). In feminine rhyme, the last two syllables of one line rhyme with the last two syllables of another line, as in ringing and singing.

Meter

The line lengths range from six to fourteen syllables. Most of the lines combine anapests and iambs, as in line 4:

….Anapest……… Iamb………….. Iamb
Of the FOR..|..est’s FERN..|..y FLOOR

Some lines contain an incomplete final foot (catalexis), as in line 21

…..Anapest………………Anapest…………………Iamb…….Incomplete
And he FELT..|..in his HEART..|..their STRANGE..|..ness

Lines 25 and 26 contain enjambment.

Figures of Speech

Alliteration

forest’s ferny floor (line 4)
smote upon the door again a second time (line 7)
suddenly smote (line 25)
Louder, and lifted his head (line 26)
silence surged softly backward (line 35)

Anaphora

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

Metaphor

in an air stirred and shaken
Comparison of the air to a thing that can be shaken

Paradox

Their stillness answering his cry
Stillness (inaudibility) is giving an answer.

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, 
   And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward (lines 33-37)
They heard . . . how the silence surged. (One cannot hear silence.)

‘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.

Setting

The action takes place late on a moonlit evening at a dwelling in a forest. The time is the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The tone is serious and the atmosphere is eerie and otherworldly.

The Traveller: A man arrives on horseback late at night.  He claims to visit some as promised earlier. 

The Listeners: Phantom spirits inside the dwelling who listen to the Traveller speaking as he pounds on the door. They do not respond to him. 

Them: The people that the Traveller came to see. They do not or cannot respond to his call because perhaps they are dead now and have become phantoms.  

The poem can be read as a metaphor for the mysteries we face in communicating with the unknown.

A.     Informal words, just as in real-life conversation

2.     “And his horse in the silence champed the grasses.” Why does the poet include this information

A.     To heighten the prevailing silence

3.     “And a bird flew up out of the turret”. Why does the poet use this image?

A.     An image from popular supernatural fiction has been used to convey a sense of the uncanny

4.     How many times does the Traveller speak?

A.     Thrice

5.     What does “the leaf-fringed sill” convey?

A.     The sense of the place being long deserted by human beings.

6.     “And he felt in his heart their strangeness”. How would you describe this feeling

A.     Uncanny

7.     Why are the phantom listeners unable to respond to the call of the Traveller?

A.     Because, as per popular notion, they belong to a different world.

8.     “’Neath the starred and leafy sky”. From whose perspective is the sky described here?

A.     The Traveller.

9.     How does the poet create meaning in the poem?

A.     through the use of negation as a cooperative process between the speaker and the hearer or the writer and the reader

10.   How does the poem end?

A.    In an open-ended manner.

11.     Is the concept of supernatural eavesdropping applicable to the poem?

A.     Yes, the Traveller felt the presence of phantoms looking upon him and listening to his call.

12.    “Their stillness answering his cry.” What is the figure of speech?