The Listeners (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Walter De la Mare
- First Published: 1912
- Type of Work: 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...
[The entire page is 1274 words long]
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