A Study Guide for Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535837989

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11

The Listeners

Walter de la Mare

1912

Introduction

The early-twentieth-century British author Walter de la Mare is acclaimed for stirring, mesmerizing poems—such as The Listeners—that seem to hurl the reader to distant, unfamiliar places, perhaps untold centuries into the past or perhaps deep into the subconscious dream-scapes of the reader's own mind. De la Mare led a contented but unexceptional life, rarely leaving the shores of Great Britain other than to lecture in the United States. Perhaps this bounded existence, though, was what allowed him to retain a childlike appreciation for the world throughout his life and inspired him to devote his poetic gifts to exploring the hidden, spiritual spaces in the human heart.

The Listeners is de la Mare's most famous, most widely anthologized poem, and it was a favorite recitation assignment among British schoolteachers for decades. The poem was lent a heightened degree of mortal significance when the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, on his deathbed in 1926, asked his wife to read him three poems before he passed away, the first being The Listeners. In the poem, a dutiful traveler has arrived on horseback at an old castle or château that seems deserted and feels haunted by lingering specters that listen but never reply to the traveller's knocks and appeals. The poem first appeared in The Listeners, and Other Poems (1912) and is also included in de la Mare's Collected Poems, 1901–1918, Vol. 1 (1920).

Author Biography

De la Mare was born in the village of Charlton, Kent County, England, on April 25, 1873. His father, already sixty-two when Walter was born, died when he was four, so de la Mare was raised solely by his Scottish mother, Lucy Sophia, to whom he was deeply devoted and who read him many nursery rhymes and fairy tales. The name Lucy appears frequently in his poetry. After the father's death, the family left the idyllic village life for London, and de la Mare began his education at the choir school of St. Paul's Cathedral. The school and choir were extremely demanding, with seven days a week