The Listeners

The Listeners "The Listeners" by Walter Del La Mare is a poem, which has an unexpected ending. I will show how the poet creates mood and atmosphere through imagery, alliteration, rhythm and rhyme. I felt this poem is very strange because it is ghostly and spooky. "The Listeners" is about a "traveller" who comes to an empty house in the forest floor and keeps on knocking on the door asking " I s there anybody there?" but no one answers and he is some how perplexed. This poem is very spooky because of the alliteration used: "his horse in the silence chomped the grasses". The mod of the poem is very intense and the intensity is created by the imagery used by the poet. The atmosphere in this poem is strange but daring as there are always questions left unanswered which the reader has to try and work out. The style in the poem is in narrative style because there are no verses and reads like a story. The rhythm is 12 and 7 beats in every 2 lines this means that there is a rhythm patterns which means every second line rhymes. This poem is written narrative, which means that the reader observes the "Traveller" as if from afar. This poem is full of great alliteration such as "forests ferny floor" the repitition is in the "F". I think it is to make you notice that the forest id soft and silent. Other examples are "silence surged softly". This is another good example of alliteration as it makes me think that the silence is surging back when the traveller is gone because there is no one left alive. My conclusion for "The Listeners" is that it is a good poem with great alliteration as it makes the poem a wee bit more scary. I think the mood creates a kind of weird atmosphere as there is no one there but the "Traveller" is still perplexed by this as he has sort of arranged a meeting of some sort and is keen to let them know "that I called