The Listeners
"Is anybody there?" said the
Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And
his horse in the silence chomped 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 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 stair
That goes down to
the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveler'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 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:
Aye, 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.