The Phenomena of Nothingness in de la Mare’s “The Listeners”

In his 1912 poem “The Listeners,” the English poet Walter de la Mare1 (1873–1956) presents a “lonely Traveller” (20)2 who comes to a house in a forest at night but fails to meet anyone. His3 knocking “on the moonlit door” (2) and repeated callings remain unanswered. Finally, he departs, asking the “phantom listeners” (13) inside the house to tell the house dwellers that he “came, and no one answered,/That [he] kept [his] word” (27–28). Readers and scholars have interpreted “The Listeners” in several ways.4 However, an important issue about the poem has nonetheless been overlooked. Studied closely, it becomes evident that the story of the Traveler betokens the nothingness one inescapably comes across in the world. In 1943, thirty-one years after the poem’s publication, the French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre (1905– 80) painstakingly dealt with the human experience of nothingness in his magnum opus Being and Nothingness. Intriguingly, the various ways de la Mare’s Traveler encounters nothingness bear striking parallels with the ones Sartre presents in his work. As such, the motif of nothingness becomes a curious issue in the poem. However, before exploring the motif of nothingness in “The Listeners,” it is necessary to mention that nothingness is never present in the world. It is because the world’s constituents, which Sartre calls matters, are wholly positive (Manser 47). They are positive for being self-contained, timeless, and without differentiation. However, they are also inert, making the world meaningless (Spade 76–85). The world acquires meaning as human consciousness is projected on it. Now, the meaning formed in this way is phenomenal, infusing the positive world with negations. It is because consciousness is negative by nature. Instead of being situated in itself, consciousness belongs to the matter it is aware of and changes by shifting from one object to another. Sartre states, “[consciousness] is not what it is and is what it is not” (Sartre 21). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184677