The Answerers

For the dverse prompt. One of my maternal grandmother’s favourite poems, and one that we learned in the primary school. I still love the mystery and the rhythm. I took the text from the Poetry Foundation.

The Listeners by Walter de la Mare

‘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.

 

And my response in the words of the Listeners.

 

We waited though nights were endless,

And the sun seemed never to shine,

We waited though soldiers trampled

Through the fields that were ours and thine,

“Come back,” but never you answered,

Our voices grew weak and frail,

And we passed from this world of sadness,

Beyond this life’s tremulous veil.

Our thoughts and our hopes were with you,

Though you never answered our call,

Through the days and nights of hardship,

Spent behind stout door and wall,

“Come back,” we called when they found us,

The soldiers who took us away,

They who took our lives and tossed them

Into darkness where they stay.

“Come back.” Listen to our last pleading,

We swear by the moon, stars and sun,

That we’ll wait for you on this dark hillside,

Until all of your days are done.