Songs of Childhood
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) was an English poet, novelist and short story writer best remembered today for his children's poetry, a few macabre short stories and his classic spooky poem, The Listeners.
Much of de la Mare's writing is about the shadowy world between the real and the unreal world where nothing is what it seems. He was born in London and worked for 18 years in the statistics office of an American oil company while writing in his spare time.
De la Mare published his first collection of poetry, Songs of Childhood, in 1902, but his most famous book of poems for children, Peacock Pie, did not appear until 1913. He wrote several books of short stories for children in the 1920s and 1930s. His Collected Stories for Children, published in 1947, won the Carnegie Medal for children's writing. A fellow writer called de la Mare's Carnegie win 'the achievement of the most gifted writer of the century who had dedicated his finest powers to delighting children'.
Is anybody listening?
The Listeners is a poem in which nothing much happens, yet it still creates a feeling of uneasiness in the reader. It is what does not happen in The Listeners that sparks our imagination. A traveller arrives at a house, gets off his horse and knocks on the front door as he calls out to the occupants.
Who the traveller is and why he has come to the house, we do not know. But as he knocks on the door, the traveller gets the spooky feeling that someone is listening and watching. Who is inside the house and why don't they answer the door? The reader's imagination has to answer that one.