Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Where does the traveler go in "The Listeners" by Walter De la Mare?

We are never given a name for the place where the Traveller arrives or a specific geographic location, but the speaker describes it for us. The Traveller, a man with gray eyes, arrives at an empty, desolate dwelling with nothing but phantoms to listen to him. He has apparently answered a call to be there—however, we enter the poem in the middle of the action without being quite sure of what happened before or why he felt the need to come.
The place where he arrives is a large house or castle (it has a turret) in the midst of a forest. It seems to be deserted, because no head sticks out of a windowsill in response to his knocking. Nobody answers the door. There is a "dark stair" and an "empty hall."
With its turrets and its sense of being abandoned and occupied by ghosts, as well as having what seems to be a stone courtyard, the setting has a medieval flavor. The Traveller arrives on horseback, also suggesting a medieval backdrop. But we are told nothing definite except that this is an eery, deserted, moonlit landscape dominated by an empty dwelling place.

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