The Listeners
by Walter De la Mare
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See Also
- Walter de la Mare (Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets)
- Walter de la Mare (Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition)
- Walter de la Mare (Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition)
- Walter de la Mare (Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Walter De la Mare
- First Published: 1912
- Type of Poem: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Traveling or travelers, Nature, Ghosts or apparitions, Listening, Horses, Night
The Poem
“The Listeners” is a single-stanza poem of thirty-six lines, rhyming abcb. The title suggests the focus of the poem: It is not on the poem’s human traveler, but on the phantom listeners who await him. The poem is written in the third person, to allow the reader to observe, objectively, the traveler first and then the listeners, and to remain behind with the listeners when the traveler hastily departs at the poem’s close.
The poem begins in medias res, with the traveler knocking on a moonlit door in an unknown place. It is this sense of...
(The entire page is 1274 words.)
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Popular Questions
See all »- What is the summary and theme of the poem "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare? traveler
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