The Full Text of “The Listeners”
1‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
2 Knocking on the moonlit door;
3And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
4 Of the forest’s ferny floor:
5And a bird flew up out of the turret,
6 Above the Traveller’s head:
7And he smote upon the door again a second time;
8 ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
9But no one descended to the Traveller;
10 No head from the leaf-fringed sill
11Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
12 Where he stood perplexed and still.
13But only a host of phantom listeners
14 That dwelt in the lone house then
15Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
16 To that voice from the world of men:
17Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
18 That goes down to the empty hall,
19Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
20 By the lonely Traveller’s call.
21And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
22 Their stillness answering his cry,
23While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
24 ’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
25For he suddenly smote on the door, even
26 Louder, and lifted his head:—
27‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
28 That I kept my word,’ he said.
29Never the least stir made the listeners,
30 Though every word he spake
31Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
32 From the one man left awake:
33Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
34 And the sound of iron on stone,
35And how the silence surged softly backward,
36 When the plunging hoofs were gone.
The Full Text of “The Listeners”
1‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
2 Knocking on the moonlit door;
3And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
4 Of the forest’s ferny floor:
5And a bird flew up out of the turret,
6 Above the Traveller’s head:
7And he smote upon the door again a second time;
8 ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
9But no one descended to the Traveller;
10 No head from the leaf-fringed sill
11Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
12 Where he stood perplexed and still.
13But only a host of phantom listeners
14 That dwelt in the lone house then
15Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
16 To that voice from the world of men:
17Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
18 That goes down to the empty hall,
19Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
20 By the lonely Traveller’s call.
21And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
22 Their stillness answering his cry,
23While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
24 ’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
25For he suddenly smote on the door, even
26 Louder, and lifted his head:—
27‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
28 That I kept my word,’ he said.
29Never the least stir made the listeners,
30 Though every word he spake
31Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
32 From the one man left awake:
33Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
34 And the sound of iron on stone,
35And how the silence surged softly backward,
36 When the plunging hoofs were gone.
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“The Listeners” Introduction
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Walter de la Mare published "The Listeners" in 1912, as the title poem of his second collection of poetry. It remains one of his most famous pieces of writing, and reflects the author's fascination with mystery and the supernatural. The poem tells the story of an unnamed "Traveller" approaching an abandoned house seemingly inhabited by ghosts, but leaves the reader's many questions as to who these entities actually are unanswered.
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“The Listeners” Summary
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An unnamed figure, the Traveller, knocks on the door of a house in the moonlight and asks if there is anyone inside. The Traveller's horse grazes in the quiet forest while the Traveller waits for a response. A bird flies out of a small tower on the house and over the Traveller's head. The Traveller knocks again, more forcefully, and repeats his question. No one comes down from the house to meet him, however. No one even leans out of the window, the sill of which is covered in leaves, to look at him. He stands in place, puzzled by the lack of an answer.
Inside the house is a group of ghostly beings. These "listeners" stand in the moonlight as they listen to the human voice coming from outside. The ghostly beings crowd around the staircase, onto which moonlight streaks, as the quiet atmosphere in the empty house is disturbed by the sound of the Traveller's lonely voice.
Outside, the Traveller senses a strange presence in the silence that meets his question. His horse, undisturbed, continues to graze in the dark forest, the sky above full of stars and obscured by trees. The Traveller suddenly beats on the door once again, even more loudly than before. He then calls out, asking whoever is listening to pass on a message: that no one answered him when he came to the house, but he kept his promise.
The listeners don't make any motion in response to this. The Traveller's words reverberate through the dark, empty house, coming from the only living person around. The phantom listeners hear him jump up onto his horse, and then the sound of the horseshoes on the stone path as the Traveller rides away. The silence of the forest quickly returns as the sound of the horse's forceful riding fades away.
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“The Listeners” Themes
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Mystery, Understanding, and the Unknown
“The Listeners” draws much of its eerie quality from the fact that its meaning is ambiguous; the poem in many ways defies interpretation precisely because it is about the unknown and the unknowable. Somewhat paradoxically, “The Listeners” acknowledges people’s desire to seek understanding while also asserting a certain insurmountable mystery of the world around them. In short, the poem suggests that people cannot always find the answers they seek, regardless of how hard they look.
The subject of the poem, the Traveller, arrives to the house in the woods clearly in search of something (though what, exactly, is never specified). He repeatedly knocks on the door to ask if anybody is there, and seems increasingly agitated by the lack of response. That his second knock is described using the word “smote” suggests a sense of urgency, his initial call having gone unanswered. Indeed, the third time he “smote on the door, even / Louder, and lifted his head:—"
He is further described as “perplexed,” and views the silent landscape as filled with “strangeness.” This illustrates his confusion about the situation in which he has found himself and reflects the air of mystery that pervades the poem in general. The essential creepiness of the poem comes from the fact that the Traveller—and the reader—doesn’t know what does or does not reside behind the door, a conceit that links the unknown with anxiety and fear.
The house also is notably situated deep within a forest and suffused by the natural world, implicitly connecting that world to the unknown. The door is “moonlit,” for instance—under the influence of the moon, which is often linked in literature to the supernatural. The forest floor is also “ferny,” suggesting that no one has walked there for some time: this is a world cut off from that of human beings. A bird flies “up out of the turret” of the house, and the house itself has a “leaf-fringed sill,” further revealing nature’s encroachment on the man-made structure. The connection of the mysterious house with nature, and the Traveller’s clear inability to communicate with those within the house, illustrates the separation of this world from “the world of men,” as the poem calls it. This, in turn, suggests that there are certain mysteries beyond the realm of humankind that people simply cannot access.
That the Traveller declares to the ostensibly absent house that he has “kept [his] word" suggests that, despite holding up his end of some bargain, he is not rewarded with any acknowledgement of his efforts. Instead, “no one answered,” and the Traveller rides away. The poem thus concludes without leaving the reader any wiser about who its subject is, or what he came to look for at an abandoned house in the middle of the night. Nor does it offer the reader a sense of who resides (or once resided) in the house. Its “conclusion,” as it were, offers no catharsis at all, reflecting the same sense of unknowability that so disturbs its subject. People may ask for answers as much as they like, the poem seems to say, but the mystery of the world comes from that fact that it will not respond. It will only listen.
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Isolation and Loneliness
Beyond underscoring the innate unknowability of the world, “The Listeners” seems to reflect the existential loneliness that results from such mystery. The poem creates a distinction between its isolated human subject, the natural world surrounding the abandoned home, and the spirits who do not answer the Traveller’s call.
On an immediate level, this could reflect the general isolation of human beings, or their despair in the absence of some guiding purpose. Although de la Mare never explained “The Listeners” explicitly, he did allegedly say before his death that the poem is “about a man encountering a universe.” Taken allegorically, the poem’s opening line “Is anybody there?” could be read as an echo of humankind’s call to an absent god. Ultimately, through the poem’s evocation of human loneliness, it suggests the indifference of the universe to people’s search for connection and meaning.
The Traveller is distinctly human, and his physical efforts stand in contrast to the ghostly stillness of the listeners. His attempts to make contact (speaking and knocking) are met with a limited natural response (the bird flying up from the turret). As a living person, he is able to make his presence known by knocking and shouting. However, he’s aware of another presence that doesn’t respond to these signals. On the other side of the door stand a group of phantoms—or spirits—who hear the Traveller but cannot or choose not to answer him. The collective immobility of the listeners heightens the Traveller’s loneliness; he is one person, trying to make an impression on a world that absorbs his actions without reacting.
In one sense, the poem is thus about a failure of connection. The Traveller does not find the people he came to meet, and while the listeners are conscious of him, they are either unable or unwilling to answer his questions. The Traveller is on an errand, which he cannot complete without the presence of the people he expected to find. His human purpose, then, meets with an unexpected spiritual intrusion. Instead of talking to living people, he is forced to leave a message with ghosts.
The listeners, whoever they are, cannot or will not interact with the living, human world. To them, the Traveller is simply a “voice from the world of men,” a representative from the other side of mortality. This suggests a world in which people are alone, and cannot count on one another, dead or alive, to answer an urgent call.
Within the poem, the supernatural presences remain silent as the Traveller calls out to them. Their “stillness” responds to his words in a way that demonstrates their presence to him: it is the intentional silence of someone listening, not the silence of no one being there. The poem can thus also be interpreted as presenting a human relationship with the mysteries of religion; a human being might imagine a god as a conversation partner that never answers, except by motionless, ghostly presence. The Traveller’s opening question, “Is anybody there?” reflects a human anxiety about the guiding forces of the universe, which may hear the desperate calling of sufferers on earth but do not answer.
The Listeners—which may represent a god, or even simply the idea of guidance or community itself—are indifferent. The Traveller’s pursuit of meaning in his errand goes unsatisfied, as the listeners’ silence forces him to ride away with the excuse that he “came and no one answered.” The human attempt to make meaning, the poem suggests—to reach out into mystery for answers—meets only a calm refusal to engage.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Listeners”
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Lines 1-4
‘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:The opening lines of "The Listeners" introduce the poem's main character, set the scene, and pose the question that is central to the mystery of the story. The subject of the poem is called simply "The Traveller," which implies that his journeying is the most important thing to know about him. He has come on horseback from some unknown location into the scene of the poem, and immediately makes his presence known by knocking on the door of a house and asking if anyone is there.
The fact that the Traveller knocks on a "moonlit door" establishes the poem's setting as a house at night, while the "ferny floor" of a forest reveals that this house is located in a wood. The presence of ferns further suggests that the forest has grown wild around the house, implying that it hasn't been cared for: the inhabitants may have been absent for a while.
The Traveller's question opens the poem with a sense of urgency. If he is knocking at a door in the middle of the night and asking if anyone is home, he must have a compelling reason. The reader is encouraged to read on in order to find out what his errand entails, and what kind of response he'll get.
In these lines, de la Mare uses two devices to contribute to the effect of the woodland scene. The onomatopoeia of "champed" makes the sound of the horse's grazing stand out vividly, in contrast with the "silence" that fills the wood. In the next line, the alliteration of "forest's ferny floor" creates a softness that mimics the texture of the overgrown forest.
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Lines 5-8
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. -
Lines 9-12
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. -
Lines 13-16
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: -
Lines 17-20
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. -
Lines 21-24
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; -
Lines 25-28
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. -
Lines 29-32
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: -
Lines 33-36
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.
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“The Listeners” Symbols
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The Traveller
It is possible to read the central character of "The Listeners," the Traveller, as a symbol for humankind as a whole. Nameless, he is defined by his journey, which makes him easy to read as a universal figure for a person traveling through life. He approaches the house in the forest on an undefined errand, which he is desperate to complete but ultimately unable to finish in a satisfactory way. This resonates with the idea of a human search for purpose that is ultimately thwarted.
Most compelling is his repeated question of "Is anybody there?" One may read this question as analogous to the human search for divine guidance, for the presence of a force operating the universe with intention. In this reading, the poem proposes the divine force as present but unresponsive and unknowable. The listeners, thus analogous to a god/gods, pay attention to human pleas but take no action and give no answers. The Traveller, representing a searching soul, is forced to turn away alone.
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“The Listeners” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Paradox
"The Listeners" presents two examples of paradox, both of which are used to heighten the meaning of a specific moment. In line 22, the Traveller senses the presence of the listeners by their "stillness answering his cry." There is an apparent paradox here: "stillness," or lack of motion, is not an answer. The paradoxical quality of the phrase asks readers to look closer. In this case, the silence of the listeners is not an absence. What the Traveller feels is the silence of people listening, not an empty house. The stillness of the listeners becomes all the more creepy, in that it represents beings who refrain, for some reason, from reacting to a human presence.
In line 35, de la Mare describes "the silence surg[ing] backwards" after the noise of galloping hooves disappears. A surge usually implies a wild and powerful movement that comes with a massive sound, such as that of a wave or a large crowd. In this case, the surge is that of "silence," which is the absence of sound. This juxtaposition creates a strange intensification, in which silence appears as a crashing but soundless force in which the scene is immersed once again.
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Anaphora
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Enjambment
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Sibilance
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Imagery
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Caesura
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Alliteration
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"The Listeners" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Champed
- Ferny
- Turret
- Smote
- Perplexed
- Dwelt
- Thronging
- Hearkening
- Cropping
- Ay
- Stirrup
- Iron
- Plunging
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"Champing," like "chomping," refers to chewing, particularly by horses and similar animals. It's an onomatopoeic word, mimicking the action with its sound. It can also signify impatience, as in the phrase "champing at the bit." In this poem, its presence is simpler, only serving to place the horse as a representative of the natural world doing a mundane thing.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Listeners”
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Form
"The Listeners" is a poem of 36 lines that does not follow a specific form. It operates primarily as one structural unit, though it could be broken up into 9 quatrains with an alternating rhyme pattern. It is made up of only five sentences, which are extended with clauses separated by commas, colons, and semicolons. The overall effect of the form is, for the reader, like being led into a winding passageway that seems endless. The reader gets no rest from the progress of the action, no time to take a breath. The form of "The Listeners" thus reflects the fact that it is a kind of poetic ghost story. Formally, it relies on a slow but relentless pace, a grim progression, building up to an ending which leaves the reader trapped in a house of spirits as the Traveller rides away.
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Meter
While "The Listeners" does not adhere to a strict metrical pattern, the even-numbered lines of the poem do stick roughly to iambic trimeter. For example, take line 30:
Though every word he spake
Even this line is slightly undercut by the possibility of reading "every" with three syllables, however, with one stressed and two unstressed. Most of the other even lines are rougher, such as this one:
Knocking on the moonlit door;
Meanwhile, the odd lines of the poem are metrically wild, covering various types of feet with no apparent reason. For example, take line 15:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair
This line is metrically confused and nonspecific, and could be scanned in various ways. De la Mare allows the odd lines to vary widely, without any strict reference to meter, which is kept somewhat in check by the even lines. The effect of this constant deviation is destabilizing, mirroring the poem's swing between reality and strangeness.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme is the most stable formal element of "The Listeners." Consistently, the even lines of the poem rhyme in pairs. The odd lines don't rhyme at all. Each quatrain thus follows this format:
ABCB
Nearly all of the rhymes in the poem are perfect, single-syllable rhymes. Once, de la Mare repeats a rhyme: "head/said" in lines 6-8 and lines 26-28. This precise repetition loops the poem around on itself like clockwork: there is only one thing the Traveller can do, which is to knock on the door, lift his head, and speak. He must repeat this several times, and then leave when his actions produce no response.
The poem's final rhyme is its only example of slant rhyme. "Stone" and "gone," although they are perfect eye rhymes, do not have the same vowel sound. This small discrepancy reflects the uncertain, unresolved nature of the poem's ending. The Traveller has left with his errand incomplete. The poem does not end in a satisfying way, and the slight deviation in rhyme reflects this dissatisfaction.
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“The Listeners” Speaker
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The speaker of "The Listeners" is a disembodied storyteller, at a distance from the action of the piece. The intention of the speaker is to tell a story—specifically, to relate a mysterious episode in the life of the Traveller who encounters a ghostly world. As a personality, the speaker seems neutral and detached from the action of the poem. The poem's narrative is simply descriptive, offering neither judgment nor much insight into the thoughts of the poem's characters.
The closest the reader gets to a character in the poem is in line 21, when the Traveller feels "in his heart" that there are supernatural presences listening to him from the silent house. The speaker doesn't offer us any information about the Traveller's thought process, but only what the Traveller does in response to those thoughts. This storytelling stance increases the sense that the poem is a tale concerned with the mysterious and unknowable, told in order to bring a chill to its listeners.
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“The Listeners” Setting
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The setting of "The Listeners" is a house in a forest at night. Clues to the setting are revealed subtly at the beginning of the poem, as the Traveller arrives. He knocks on a "moonlit door," showing both that it is nighttime and that he has arrived at a house. Meanwhile, his horse grazes on "the forest's ferny floor," which demonstrates that the house is in a wood, and that the area around it has become overgrown.
The setting of the poem never changes, although the reader is allowed to shift perspective, going from the Traveller outside the house to the listeners inside. There is a description of a "turret," implying that the house is a grand one. Otherwise, the prevailing characteristic of the setting is stillness and silence. The Traveller's presence disturbs this stillness, but his retreat allows it to return, bringing the setting back to its timeless state.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Listeners”
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Literary Context
"The Listeners" was published in 1912 as the title poem of Walter de la Mare's second collection. A bookkeeper who lived a relatively unremarkable life, de la Mare had begun publishing poetry and fiction in 1895. By the time he wrote "The Listeners," he had received a government pension in recognition of his work, which allowed him to retire from his job and write full-time. Over his lifetime, he published a stunning amount of literature for children and adults, including novels, short story collections, poetry collections, works of nonfiction, and one play.
De la Mare is known as a writer of the imagination. He was fascinated by children's view of the world, which he saw as more emotionally true, intuitive, and visionary than adult life allows for. In his writing, he sought to achieve a dream-like atmosphere, with the implication of other worlds that can't be understood by human reason. As a poet, he is often compared to his older contemporary Thomas Hardy, whom he admired and was acquainted with. Hardy's visionary poetic sensibility was a great influence on de la Mare, who even wrote a poem about his 1921 visit to Hardy's home. Hardy himself allegedly asked his wife to read him "The Listeners" towards the end of his life, remarking, "That is possibly the finest poem of the century."
De la Mare is also associated with several poets anthologized in a series called "Georgian Poetry," referring to the reign of King George V. The poets of this school come at a point between the classicism of Victorian poetry and the Modernist rejection of sentimentality. The anthologies include poems notable for their emotion, aestheticism, and even self-indulgence. The most well-known poets of the school are Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, D.H. Lawrence, and de la Mare himself.
Later writers like W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost expressed admiration for his imaginative and technically masterful poetry, but most of de la Mare's poems are relatively little known today. "The Listeners" remains the most famous of his works, and certainly his most well-known poem. However, his fiction has continued to influence writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Writers such as Richard Adams and Joan Aiken have praised his work, and H.P. Lovecraft considered him a master of "fear-studies," or writings about the uncanny.
Historical Context
De la Mare published "The Listeners" in 1912, two years before the start of World War I. Some of his younger contemporaries, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke, would go on to fight and die in the war, writing and publishing about their experiences. Too old to be obliged to serve, de la Mare continued to live a quiet, domestic life.
De la Mare lived to see the massive changes that the world wars brought to England, from broader industrialization to the destabilization of class. His poems, however, continued to operate in his private world of romantic fantasy, Gothic castles, and forests. De la Mare was never a political poet, in that he did not explicitly address the forces that govern people's lives. He preferred instead to focus on the internal experience of emotion and to envision the world as seen through an imaginative child's eyes. However, one important element of his poems is the progress of time, and the loss it inevitably leads to. The poet outlived most of his friends, his wife, and his reputation as a great writer, dying in 1956.
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More “The Listeners” Resources
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External Resources
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BBC Radio Performance of "Seaton's Aunt" — One recording of Walter de la Mare's ghost story, "Seaton's Aunt," among readings of his other tales of the supernatural.
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Walter de la Mare's Biography — An overview of de la Mare's life, including a brief analysis of his poetry and fiction.
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Anthony Hecht on Walter de la Mare — A brief introduction to Walter de la Mare's life and work by American poet Anthony Hecht, followed by a selection of de la Mare's poems.
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Critical Essays on de la Mare — A small online collection of essays about de la Mare's work and his literary context, hosted by the Walter de la Mare Society.
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Listen to "The Listeners" — A reading of "The Listeners," and another poem by Walter de la Mare, hosted by the Poetry Archive.
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Georgian Poetry — One overview and analysis of the school of Georgian Poetry, of which de la Mare was a part.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Walter De La Mare
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