Is there anyone home?

HAVE you ever been shaken by a dream? You wake up and it has truly rattled or bewildered you? You were almost at that point where there was a purpose to the dream or a message or some sort of ‘answer’?

But you don’t get to that point. It stops short, and one is left full of questions and gaps. And that can be difficult because most of the time we feel we need the answers, not so much that we are entitled to them, or deserve to fully understand everything in life, but a little bit of an explanation on life’s great questions would go a long way to easing and settling our minds. Particularly in the dark of night. In the eerie silence when the deep seems even deeper! And the mole hills morph into mountains.

Maybe in the depths of night, or in the silent darkness, devoid of visual, and hopefully audio distractions, we are alone with our souls and have time to actually think.

And these enormous questions, why are we here, what are we, where has everybody gone, is there an afterlife, and if so, am I on the list?

If not, why not? Religion, social interaction, love, decency and our own behaviours leave this gigantic onus and expectation on us to get it right, to do the right thing, to be just and true and pave the way towards a peaceful logic.

And without it we are needy and lost, in the scary dark, as it were. Is anybody with an answer listening to us? I

s the sleeping mind scrambling for the solution, and our dreams a lot more than mere random nonsense? Our night time visions usually pose more questions than answers and in their complex way energise all our complicated doubts.

British poet Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) encapsulated this nagging human trait beautifully in his poem ‘The Listeners’ first published in 1912. He was a great exponent of the works of our imaginations and all its limitless colour. Like an ever expanding universe.

In this poem, the Traveller seeks what or who is on the other side of a metaphorical door. And can they see or hear him and hopefully give him that answer. The poem, with it’s creative imagery, paints the picture so well and brings to the table that critical human frailty, doubting our correctness... ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, that I kept my word,’

The Listeners

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 the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey 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 Traveller’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 on 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: Ay, 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.