Discussion Topic
The traveler's destination in Walter De la Mare's "The Listeners."
Summary:
The traveler in Walter De la Mare's "The Listeners" is seeking to fulfill a promise by visiting a mysterious, possibly abandoned house. He knocks on the door and calls out, but receives no response from the unseen listeners within, ultimately leaving without achieving his goal.
Where does the traveler visit in "The Listeners" by Walter De la Mare?
We are never given a name for the place where the Traveller arrives or a specific geographic location, but the speaker describes it for us. The Traveller, a man with gray eyes, arrives at an empty, desolate dwelling with nothing but phantoms to listen to him. He has apparently answered a call to be there—however, we enter the poem in the middle of the action without being quite sure of what happened before or why he felt the need to come.
The place where he arrives is a large house or castle (it has a turret) in the midst of a forest. It seems to be deserted, because no head sticks out of a windowsill in response to his knocking. Nobody answers the door. There is a "dark stair" and an "empty hall."
With its turrets and its sense of being abandoned and occupied by ghosts, as well as having...
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what seems to be a stone courtyard, the setting has a medieval flavor. The Traveller arrives on horseback, also suggesting a medieval backdrop. But we are told nothing definite except that this is an eery, deserted, moonlit landscape dominated by an empty dwelling place.
What location did the traveller in "The Listeners" arrive at?
In "The Listeners," Walter de la Mare cultivates an atmosphere of mystery. It is not surprising, therefore, that we know very little about the place to which the traveler has come. The poem begins with him knocking on a door at night, in or near a forest. The building he finds is later described as a house, but before this is mentioned, we learn that it has at least one turret, usually associated with castles. One of the window sills is also described as "leaf-fringed," which suggests that the house or castle is covered with ivy or some other climbing plant.
The house is still and shadowy and seems to be haunted. We never learn exactly who the titular listeners are, but they are given the epithet "phantom" and may very well be ghosts. The traveler ends by announcing that he has kept his word, so we assume that he is keeping an appointment by coming to this lonely place, though we can only guess at the circumstances and conditions under which he undertook to be there.
In short, the place to which the traveler comes is a house or castle in or beside a forest. It is probably covered with ivy and is inhabited only by some phantom "listeners," perhaps ghosts, who give no sign of their presence.