The Listeners
"Is there anybody there?"
said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse
in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest's ferny floor;
And
a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head.
And
he smote upon the door again a second time;
"Is there anybody
there?" he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No
head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his
grey 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
stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air
stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt
in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his
cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the
starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door,
even
Louder, and lifted his head:
"Tell them I came, and
no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.
Never the
least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell
echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one
man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And
the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly
backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone. »
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