Philistines might say that they “don’t get” poetry because it’s dressed up in flowery language and they can’t understand it. If the objective is to tell a story or communicate a message, they wonder, why dress it up in poetic language so that the meaning is obscured and only serves to create work for the reader to tease out the meaning? Well, I don’t know if such radical philistines actually exist, but I do know that the beauty of poetry is part and parcel of its ability to challenge and inspire the imagination. Neuroscience-y types will tell you that poetic language bypasses the rational left hemisphere and enters the imaginal realm of the right brain, where metaphorical connections can be made and ideas fused.
Sometimes, though, the poet doesn’t even need to bamboozle us with fancy language – he can literally omit key information from the narrative altogether. One such poem that springs to mind is Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners which relies entirely on the reader’s imagination. The Listeners is one of de la Mare’s most famous poems and certainly one of his most atmospheric. Its theme is the nocturnal encounter between an unnamed “Traveller” and a house inhabited by mysterious “Listeners”. The poem is deliberate in its posing of questions without providing any answers; it’s for the reader to fill in the gaps or, more likely, simply bask in the mystery.
The key characters — the Traveller, the Listeners, and the mysterious “Them” for whom the Traveller has a message — are all unnamed and sparsely described. We know nothing about this Traveller (other than that his eyes are ‘grey’, a nondescript colour that is presumably quite deliberate) nor why he has come knocking on the door of this house. Who are the Listeners, to whom the Traveller declares that he has kept his “word”? We do not know what “word” he is keeping, nor to whom he is keeping it.
But who cares? De la Mare makes great use of sound imagery in this poem, creating a semantic field of sound to intensify the sense of atmosphere. We can imagine how these noises would cut into the silence of a forest by moonlight. The rap on the door, the flutter of the disturbed bird, the words that go echoing through the house, the horse chomping on the forest floor, and when he finally goes off into the darkness, there is the sound of “iron on stone” before the “silence surged softly backward”. The noises in the scene are almost an act of violence upon it.
By the poem’s end, we still don’t know what promise is being kept on this night, nor who the people involved are, but, at the very least, we’re intrigued…marvellous stuff!
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
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.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
