The Listeners - Walter de la Mare

This really takes me back. I was startled by a few lines from the poem today while I was reading The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, I turned a page and there they were.

I loved this poem because it is so mysterious and the scene, the imagery is magical. It's strange, because I never really knew it by heart, and usually I learn poems by heart which mean something to me, but with this, I never did. I first discovered it in twelfth grade when I was collecting the blue poetry volumes in the Penguin Popular Classics series, I think it was in one of those that I read it first. I love it.
But I never really could put my finger on why I love it so much.

When googling for it today, I found it on the minstrels. The Minstrels, a newsgroup hosted by Rice University for Computer Science, founded in 1999, is one of my favourite poetry sites.
And what did I see?

The Listeners was the second poem they uploaded, back in 1999, and the number of reactions it received were enormous by the standards of the site. Nearly ALL of the people who said something it said how much they loved it, that they loved this poem even though they usually hated poetry at school. There were many people who said that they had very fond memories of the poem, that they had a connection to it somehow.

In short, they feel like I do. I don't know what makes this poem one of the all-time favourites, much like Daffodils, but it is. It is one of my life-saving poems and it is very reassuring that there are people who feel about this like I do.


The Listeners

'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.

-- Walter De La Mare.