Poetry Friday IV - The Listeners

Today we have a day off here in Sydney for APEC. It has been mildly inconvenient getting to work this week, and I have hopped off buses in some strange places because I was going to be able to walk a whole lot faster than a bus was ever going to get me to my destination. Yesterday morning I got off a bus, which was supposed to go through the Eastern Distributor, on the Eastern side of Hyde Park, to walk to Pyrmont. I suspect that I then participated in the exploitation of children for political purposes as I walked through Hyde Park in that after I politely declined taking a brochure from an elderly gentleman protesting against the persecution of Falun Gong in China, because I had collected that brochure the day before, I then came across a very gorgeous little Chinese girl, looking very earnest and struggling with her pile of the very same brochures and I couldn't resist taking one, with a big smile on my face what's more. Yesterday morning Bush had also decided to go to the Maritime Museum, which wreaked a little havoc in my neck of the working woods in Pyrmont. However, I am not actually going to moan about any of that, because where would be the point, and today I have the whole day off! So, I thought it a fitting day to post a purely escapist poem. I really like this poem. I couldn't even tell you why, except that it takes me away to somewhere else, and I find myself in a moonlit forest ...

The Listeners

"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:

Aye, 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 1873-1956