The Listeners
The French Huguenots were Protestants who were persecuted for their faith and fled their country in the 16th and 17th centuries. British poet and novelist Walter John de la Mare, or as most of us know him, Walter de la Mare, was a descendant of French Huguenots.
De la Mare was born in 1873 in Kent, England. For eighteen years (1890–1908), he worked in the Anglo-American oil company. After work, he devoted his time to writing. The family was poor, and he lived and wrote in a small house. In 1908, he finally saw an improvement in his lot, when he was given a pension. He was able to leave his job and concentrate on his writing. He was also able to move to a larger house. To his relief, this house had enough space for him to devote a room just for his writing. In this house, overlooking an orchard, de la Mare wrote the poem, ‘The Listeners’. This poem brought him much-deserved acclaim and was once adjudged Britain’s favourite poem.
The Listeners is a poem with a strong element of the supernatural, something that de la Mare was adept at. A lonely traveller stops at the door of a house in the forest in the dead of the night. It appears that he had anticipated that the house would be occupied. He knocks and asks,
“Is there anybody there?”
And when there is no answer, he stands ‘perplexed and still’. We get the impression that before his arrival the forest and the house were completely silent. His first knock sent a bird flying out of a turret.
What the reader knows, and what the traveller doesn’t know yet, is that though the house does not have any living inhabitants it is full of phantoms.
“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.”
These spirits do not give a feeling of malevolence. They are just a quiet presence. They wish the traveller no harm. They do not ignore him either. They are incapable of answering him. But they all stop and listen to him. The poem suggests absolute stillness and rapt attention- a kind that few of us are capable of.
At this juncture in the poem, the traveller feels the presence of these phantoms. He doesn’t feel fear. The poet does not describe a panic, a quickening of the pulse, or a rising of the hair on the back of the neck. Instead, the traveller feels heard. He feels their attention on his words. And he trusts the phantoms enough to leave a message.
“ ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word’, he said.”
Leaving his message with the phantoms, the traveller gets back on his horse, who is silently grazing nearby, and is gone. De la Mare beautifully describes how the silence returns.
“And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”
De la Mare explained to Laurence Whistler in the 1950s, that the poem was about ‘a man encountering a universe’.
Even if one does not believe in the supernatural, the poem evokes a feeling that we humans are just a very small part of this world. There are parts of the universe that we do not know of, and that we do not understand. Wherever we go, we bring with us action and sound. And when we leave, nature, like a boundless sea, returns to its original vast quietness.
