When was the listeners written

Georgian Poetry — One overview and analysis of the school of Georgian Poetry, of which de la Mare was a part. LitCharts Teacher Editions.

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Registration takes a minute or two. We only collect the information we need to run the competition and we will not give it to anyone else without your express permission. Is there anybody there? 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. 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.

Walter de la Mare wrote for both children and adults. He began writing while working in the statistics department of an oil company in London. His novels, such as The Return , often deal with a heightened reality that contains elements of fantasy and the supernatural.

The poem begins with the traveller knocking on a moonlit door in an unknown place. It is this sense of the unknown, with all its ambiguities, that controls the tone and mood of the poem.

The place in the forest where the traveller finds himself is deserted and overgrown with brambles. The sense of isolation and strangeness causes the lonely human visitor first to knock on the door of the turreted house, then to smite it, and finally to smite it even louder, as his cries receive no response. It is only he who is perplexed and lonely in this night time scene though his horse is shown contentedly champing the grasses.

It is clearly to keep some promise, though it is peculiar for him to come to this lonely and isolated place in the middle of the night. Something must have compelled him to cry out repeatedly to a deserted house, without entering to see for himself who or what might be there.

The poem ends with a shift in focus from the lonely traveller to the silent listeners; while he rushes to flee the scene, they remain behind in the returning silence. Though the traveller leaves by leaving an oral message to the unknowns and leaves the place but the readers are left to think as who the listeners were — were they really ghosts or anything else be the case.

The poem is set in a moonlit evening at a dwelling in a forest. The tone is serious and the atmosphere is eerie and supernatural otherworldly. A mystery shrouds the poem in the end leaving the reader thinking as who were in the house. The poem creates an eerie and mysterious atmosphere with supernatural touch. The poem develops through a starry moonlit night.

The traveller knocks the door of a big house thrice but gets silence in reply. It might be that there were phantoms listening but not responding. The traveller stands there still hoping someone to come out and lean over the window. Not only the traveller but his horse also senses strangeness in the atmosphere. When the stranger leaves the place, the same eerie silence follows.

The reader is left with guessing and thinking as who might be there in the house. No one answered the traveller because there were either no one in the house except the host of phantoms or the house was empty.