I was doing research on things to post as apocafic prompts yesterday, and ran across The Listeners, by Walter de la Mare (which I didn't post as a prompt, because I don't think it quite works for either apocafic or Stargate). I love this poem. It always makes me think of Tanith Lee. Once upon a time, I did a painting of how I saw it (oy), so I have some quite strong visual opinions about it. Someone recently designed a garden around the poem, for the Hampton Court Flower Show, and although it was a lovely garden, it didn't really fit my ideas. Too clean, too open to the sun... too designed - IMO, it needs an ancient stone manor in a clearing of a forest, left undisturbed, with the forest creeping in. It had a few elements that worked for me, like the hedges, but mostly, I thought it lacked sufficient eerie gloom.

I guess you can argue that the designer wasn't designing it to look exactly like the poem - she was designing it to reflect the themes, to evoke the atmosphere... I'd love to have seen the garden, and experienced it in person. I still think it's misguided, though. Oh, it's so obvious why I had problems in art school. *g*

Anyhow, here's the poem -

The Listeners 
Walter de la Mare

"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.