Poetry Unbound Bonus — Walter de la Mare
3/9/20269 min
Host Pádraig Ó Tuama shares “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare, a favorite childhood poem of his, and offers an audio postscript to Season 10 of Poetry Unbound. Later in 2026, he will bring us more Poetry Unbound to look forward to — find out what and when here. In the meantime, you can listen to past episodes of Poetry Unbound or to new episodes of On Being with Krista Tippett, out now.
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Walter de la Mare was born on April 25, 1873, in London. He is the author of numerous books, including The Veil and Other Poems (Constable & Company, 1921) and The Listeners (Constable & Company, 1912). He died on June 22, 1956, in Twickenham, England.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsPádraig Ó Tuama· Host0:00
[instrumental music] Hi friends, this is Pádraig Ó Tuama here. Season 10 of Poetry Unbound has come to an end, and Season 11, as well as other delicious things from On Being and Poetry Unbound are to come later on this year. But I wanted to offer you a nugget, a poem I learned off by heart when I was 11. I should say before I read it for you, I'm recording this at home, so if you hear a siren or a hissing pipe or a neighbor or my friend from Ireland who's visiting me in New York, well, that's the way things go. "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare. " 'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveler, 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 Traveler's head. And he smote upon the door again a second time. 'Is there anybody there?' he said. But no one descended to the Traveler. No head from the leaf-fringed sill leaned over and looked into his gray 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