Poetry and Poems

Heres a virtual movie of the celebrated British poet ans author Walter De La Mare (1873-1956)Reading his most loved poem “The Listeners”

Walter de la Mare was born in Kent in 1873 and educated at St Pauls Cathedral Choir School. At the age of sixteen he began work in the Anglo-American oil company, where he remained for twenty years. In 1899 he married Elfie Ingpen, a woman some years his senior.

Writing under the pseudonym Walter Ramal he published Songs of Childhood (1902), a volume that reveals his particular talent as a childrens writer. This he followed with Peacock Pie (1913) which remains to this day a well-known collection for children. Songs of Childhood and Peacock Pie emphasise the darker side of childhood, with recurrent strains of sadness, loss and cruelty.

In his early poetry for adults, The Listeners (1912) and Motley (1918), de la Mare established the themes that typified his work in ensuing years: dreams, memory, vacancy, transience. There is a recurrent sense of ghostly presence, with strong tones of faerie and folklore. Few of his poems refer directly to events, people and places, and it is de la Mares ostensible divorce from social actuality that has probably led to his lengthy neglect. In his own time, however, this fey quality was viewed more positively, with early critics such as Middleton Murry and Forrest Reid valuing de la Mare for maintaining a hint of the magical in the midst of modernity. At the same time he was greatly admired for his virtuosity in traditional verse forms. His fluent but conventional prosody leads to a lyrical, song-like pitch that is deeply suited to his unashamedly romantic content.

A friend of non-Modernistic English poets such as Newbolt, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Gibson and Rupert Brooke, and contributor to Edward Marshs Georgian Poetry collections, de la Mares reputation is popular rather than academic. Several of his poems The Listeners, Arabia and The Mocking Fairy are frequently anthologised.

Kind Regards

Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2008

The Listeners (1912)

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
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.

Duration : 0:1:40

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