“The Listeners” is Walter de la Mare’s most famous poem. It features nine stanzas, each with the rime scheme ABCB.
First Stanza: “‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller”
The scene is set in the first stanza. A man is knocking on the door of a house in a forest; it is nighttime and as he knocks, his horse munches the “grasses / Of the forest’s ferny floor.” The man is identified only as “the Traveller” throughout the poem.
Second Stanza: “And a bird flew up out of the turret”
The traveler’s knocking and calling out frightens a bird; the bird then flies “out of the turret.” That the house had a “turret” indicates that it is not just a small cabin in the woods. The man then knocks on the door again and calls out, “Is there anybody there?”
Third Stanza: “But no one descended to the Traveller”
The man stands still and waits for a response to his rapping at the door, but no one appears to answer. No one comes to the door, and no one even looks out of the window. If someone had looked out at the traveler, s/he would have noted that the traveler had “grey eyes.”
Fourth Stanza: “But only a host of phantom listeners”
The narrator of this mysterious incident then allows the reader to glimpse behind the closed door what the traveler cannot see. The reader is informed, “only a host of phantom listeners / That dwelt in the house then / Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight.”
The listeners do not seem to be flesh and blood human beings, but mere ghosts who simply stand “listening” “To that voice from the world of men.”
Fifth Stanza: “Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair”
The listeners are still standing in the fifth stanza; they are “thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair.” The stairway leads “down to the empty hall.” Thus, the phantoms stand on the stairway listening as the traveler’s knocking and calling out disturbs the quietness of that empty hall.
Sixth Stanza: “And he felt in his heart their strangeness”
The traveler seems to sense the “strangeness” of those ghost-like presences within the house through the “stillness” that is “answering his cry.” The only noise that he can hear is his horse that continues to munch the grass, “cropping the dark turf.” Above him, he can see the stars and leaves from the trees that shelter the house in the forest.
Seventh Stanza: “For he suddenly smote on the door, even“
A sudden movement startles the reader as the man gives the door one last thump, this time banging it harder than before. But because no one comes to answer, he calls out, “Tell them I came, and no one answered, / That I kept my word.”
The reader now knows why the man is there rapping on the door at night in the moonlight: he has promised someone he would do so. But the reader still does not know to whom he made the promise or for what reason.
Eighth Stanza: “Never the least stir made the listeners”
Still, the phantom listeners do not move or speak, even though they must have heard the words as they “[f]ell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house.”
Ninth Stanza: “Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup”
Finally, the traveler mounts his horse and rides off, but the scene of the traveler leaving is revealed only by what the listeners hear: they hear him put his foot in the stirrup, they hear the clanking of the horseshoes upon the stony earth, and lastly, they hear the horse’s hoofs speed up into a gallop.
And then they hear nothing, only “how the silence surged softly backward.” The listeners are left standing on the stairway in the moonlight, and no one ever knows why. The mystery remains.
Commentary
This poem enjoys a cult-like following. The famous novelist and poet Thomas Hardy said about this poem, “'The Listeners' is possibly the finest poem of the century." Hardy’s widow recounted that toward the end of his life, her husband would become bored listening to prose, but he would have her read “The Listeners” to him in the middle of the night.
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