A line a night

Walter de la Mare, “The Listeners” (1912).

A traveller knocks on a moonlit door. No head leans from the sill, no one comes down. A bird flies up out of the turret, his horse crops the dark turf, and the house holds still. He knocks a second time, louder, and leaves one message with whoever might be inside:

'Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,' he said.

What gets me is everything he doesn't say. Not tell them I waited. Not tell them it stung. Not tell them they owe me an answer. Just the plain fact, left at the door: I came, and I kept my word. The reply was never the point. The keeping was.

I knock on a few doors most weeks. Some open. Some stay shut. This is the line I want to carry out of the poem: do the knock honestly, then let the keeping be the whole of it.

Ninth line kept.