“The Listeners” is the most famous and frequently anthologized poem by Walter de la Mare, an author otherwise known mostly for his horror fiction and works for children. It first appeared in print in 1912 in de la Mare’s third collection of poetry, The Listeners, and Other Poems. Written in a melodious, haunting, and almost incantatory style, the poem quickly became of one the canonical works that most every British student could expect to be required to memorize at some point in his or her education. So much so that in her 1966 study of Walter de la Mare, the critic Doris Ross McRossen asked, “What school child has not, at one time or another, intoned ‘"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller….'” (47). And “The Listeners” only gained in notoriety when the renowned novelist and poet Thomas Hardy reportedly selected it as one of the three poems he asked his wife to read to him as he lay on his deathbed in 1926.
The poem’s thirty-six lines are divided into nine quartets, in each of which the second and fourth lines rhyme. Though the events of the poem are on their face quite simple—a man referred to as “the Traveller” arrives at the home of the titular “Listeners,” knocks on the door three times, and leaves—de la Mare’s poem conveys a profound sense of ambiguity. While it doesn’t conform strictly to any particular classical meter or form, “The Listeners” falls firmly within the more traditional Georgian school of English verse. The poem’s diction, setting (a mysterious wooded area), and subject-matter (entirely divorced from modern everyday life), pose a stark contrast to the poetry and prose of modernists such as T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, who were de la Mare’s contemporaries.
While many of those author’s works are emphatically of the time and place in which they were written, the power of, and persistent interest in, “The Listeners” perhaps derives from its timelessness. In its abstraction, the feeling it evokes of a parable whose lesson has gone missing, it both draws on the power of the age-old tradition of poetry as myth and unsettles that tradition, and the reader, in its refusal to provide either context or closure.
