sentence one chooses to hear. This uncanny dilemma of attention is
precisely the poem’s point, though; how much ‘there’ is there, exactly?
This unsettling interchange of intuition and doubt might be summed
up in de la Mare’s most well-loved poem, ‘The Listeners’, with its
tentative opening question, ‘Is there anybody there?’, whose very rhythm
suggests all the uncanny circlings and checks of the mind faced with the
presence of something missing. The poem’s metre is famously tricky, and
it is difficult to know whether to read its odd lines with a long three or a
quick four stresses.^44 But such uncertainty may be germane, for the failure
of prosodic attempts to resolve it into a consistent overall pattern suggests
that its irregularities may be important, as in ‘The Linnet’, where de la
Mare uses a missing beat to simulate the way the bird is encountered by a
couple of unexpected half-glimpses and sounds, perceived only as it
vanishes:
Upon this leafy bush
With thorns and roses in it,
Flutters a thing of light,
A twittering linnet.The two beats of the fourth line evade the too-obvious rhyme set up by
‘in it’, as if the linnet appeared and then was suddenly gone more quickly
than the three beats of the previous lines expect. So here, the three-stress
lines are also the ones that describe the positiveabsenceof the listeners, felt
in what doesn’t happen: ‘But no one descended to the Traveller’, ‘And he
felt in his heart their strangeness’, and ‘Never the least stir made the
listeners’. Inversely, the additional stresses in ‘Stood thronging the faint
moonbeams on the dark stair’ are also appropriate to the crowded
stairway, and twice, the metre gives way entirely to sheer verbal effect,
as when the flurry of unstressed syllables in ‘And a bird flew up out of the
turret’ mimics the panicky flap and flutter of wings; ‘Fell echoing through
the shadowiness of the still house’ has so many syllables to it one loses the
beat altogether for the sheer clatter and echo of the words tumbling after
one another, like the Traveller’s own words. But there is no particular
reason for the first line to be either three or four, and having two
possibilities is crucial to it. If the poem begins with ‘ “Is there a ́nybody
the ́re?” said the Tra ́veller’, it is an honest question. But if the poem starts,
‘“I ́s there a ́nybody the ́re?” said the Tra ́veller’, it is a query that suspects
the answer already. The listeners have somehow communicated to him
their presence,hisstrangeness, before he has even spoken. This is the
uncanny moment; where one becomes a stranger to oneself, like Freud
Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 127