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.