Walter de La Mare

A strong sense of wonder let Walter de La Mare write mysterious, ethereal poems and stories that can give chills to both young and old—he was a “poet of dusk.” Born in Kent, the “garden of England,” he grew up immersed in nature, but settled in London in 1890, where he worked in an office. A government pension in 1908 allowed him to write full-time, and in 1953 he was awarded the high honor of an Order of Merit. His 1923 anthology Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages is a classic.

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The Listeners

By Walter de La Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
   Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
   Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
   Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon...

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