OPINION (AN COLÚN): Embracing a state of mind which leads to an enriched life

AT the age of ten when in school, I learned “The Listeners” by heart and recited it in front of a few hundred of my schoolmates. I still know the poem by heart and still greatly enjoy it. When I was ten I knew nothing about its author, Walter de la Mare. I remember liking the poem with its narration about unseen watchers, ghostly viewers gazing down upon the visitor from the dark windows of the house. I remember thinking about those ghosts and fabricating stories around them, using my imagination to create stories past, present and future.
Like all children I had a very vivid imagination, which could either frighten or enchant me. It prevented me from entering night-time woods because of a fear of malevolent spirits; and it conjured in my mind's eye thoughts and images of paradise which opened the door to beautiful, peaceful, heartening, soulful things entering into my being.
Because it possesses a wonderful sense of mystery, The Listeners is an excellent poem for children. The narrative is very simple. It begins with an unnamed wanderer who knocks on the door of a house late at night. It's a beautiful starlit night and he has a horse with him. There is no reply therefore he knocks again. Still no answer. Then he makes a peculiar statement which shows that he is probably aware there are ghosts in the house and they are watching him, because he says, “Tell them I came and no one answered, that I kept my word.” We are not told who he gave his word to, nor why he is at the house - it's as if we have been thrown into the middle of a novel and we don't know what has gone on before or after our arrival. The reader invests the shoes of the person knocking on the door and can sense the ghosts watching him. It's not certain whether these are malignant or benign ghosts.
The Listeners begins with the following famous lines,
“ '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.”
But no one descends to him. We are told he has grey eyes and is “perplexed”. He can feel the “strangeness” and “stillness” of the phantom listeners watching him -
“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”
There are many phantoms in the house (which is suitably castellated in appearance - a bird flies out of a turret) because they are “thronging the dark stair” and they are listening “in an air stirred and shaken / By the lonely Traveller's call.” They won't answer and he gives up. He mounts his horse and canters off - in the house “the silence surged softly backward, / When the plunging hoofs were gone.”
One interesting interpretation of The Listeners is that the Traveller is seeking to immerse himself in a state of mind where he can give full expression to an unfettered imagination, to a creative way of living, and the phantoms symbolise that desired state of mind. He longs to be creative, to be himself, but on this occasion he fails to do so.
De la Mare had an interesting theory about the imaginative nature of children and how this becomes lost or submerged as they grow older. He defined two types of imagination, one called “childlike”, the other “boylike”. He said all children have a childlike imagination but it is supplanted at some stage in their lives. “Children,” he wrote, “are not so closely confined and bound in by their groping sense. Facts to them are the liveliest chameleons...They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision.” In other words visionaries and children have something in common, and this quality of the mind can be an excellent thing leading to a creative way of living life or it can be negative because it disconnects us from life to such an extent that we put ourselves in the way of harm.
De La Mare argued that unfortunately, because of the external world's rude and unsympathetic effects upon the mind, the childlike imagination becomes frightened and “retires like a shocked snail into its shell”. In its place arises the boylike imagination which is intellectual and analytical. By the time we reach our adult years the childlike imagination has either disappeared into its shell for large parts of one's life, or else it has become courageous and is emerging more and more in the world, transfigured into an adult form, rejecting society's straitjacketing modes of being. The former state of being is the way many people are. The latter is the way poets can be. De la Mare commented that the mind which is boylike is logical and deductive, while that which is childlike is intuitive and inductive. “Illumined by the imagination,” he writes, “life - whatever its defeats and despairs - is a never-ending, unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery. This is the fountain of our faith and of our hope.”