"The Listeners" (A Poem)

First published in 1912, "The Listeners" is Walter de la Mare's most famous poem and one of the many supernatural stories he composed throughout his literary career. In the tale, a traveler ventures to an abandoned house nestled in a dark forest. While he knocks on the front door, a cluster of specters listen inertly to his calls. As David Sanders and Jacob Weisman emphasize, the poem "is a work of mystery and ambiguity." Who are them the traveler came to visit and what is his promise ("'Tell them I came, and no one answered / That I kept my word'")? Them, obviously, are individuals the traveler intends to see; however, the question remains why they don't answer the door. Are they unable to hear his knocks as they sleep soundly in their beds? Are they trying to avoid his presence? Have they moved and neglected to provide their new address? Or, have they perished and are now the phantom listeners lingering in the deserted home? 

"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.

Works Referenced

de la Mare, Walter. "The Listeners." The Listeners and Other Poems. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916. 64-65.

Sanders, David and Jacob Weisman, eds. The Treasury of the Fantastic: Romanticism to Early Twentieth Century Literature. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon, 2013.