In addition to the whole snowy silence of the poem, these lines struck me. It makes me think about how our journeys are our journeys and we show up and we keep our integrity regardless of what the result is.
So today, I will show up, show up for myself on this journey of life. Others are welcome to open the door for me when I arrive, but I cannot force the door open, nor shall I make up the stories of why they did not open the door. But I have myself. And the sky. And the journey continues.
Poems are so interesting. They are our attempt to capture something beyond language with language itself. I think all interpretations have something to teach us. When I was a professor of poetry I presented poems on multiple levels. How was it written, how does it sound, where and when was it written and then there was the discussion of what it evokes for us. So simple and so complex - like life - like a building we can all inhabit.
I would love to take a class from you. 😊 “Poems...are our attempt to capture something beyond language with language itself.” I hadn’t thought of it that way before. No wonder it’s so difficult to write poetry! lol
I love this line as well. I’m caught up in the mystery of silence surging backwards. From the traveler or the ghosts? I like to visualize it both ways.
I was surprised how much of this poem I had retained! I can’t remember if I learned it in 6th class in primary school (they had us learning various poems off by heart: The Ballad of Father Gilligan is another one cemented into my mind) or in first year in secondary school.
The line that returns to me ever so often is his cry “Tell them I came and no one answered, that I kept my word”. Maybe it was my adolescent fear of being misunderstood that made that line resonate with me. Or it might have been the burst of noise and life clashing with the silence of the house and the listeners that made it jump out at me.
In any event, thanks for this unexpected Sunday walk down memory lane!
I am with you on this Dylan. That’s the line that resonates with me too. I have been thinking all week about your post last week Padraig on translation. I had a lot of moments this week where I pondered miscommunication, times when the translation is altered...wrong. This reminds me of times where even when I fail at connecting, I want people to know that I tried, which actually feels more selfish than a true desire to connect in some ways.
I love this community. I love how reading other people’s comments makes me think deeper about myself and my interpretation. I am now thinking about some relationships where I am not receiving communication from the other side, this is starting to make me think about how I can show up anyway, I still haven’t figured it out yet, but I like the idea that there’s something in the act of showing up. And the reminder and grace that it’s vulnerable and hard.
At that point in the poem, my throat tightened up and tears came. So moved by this desperation, this knocking, and again, then louder.. a desperation. “Can you hear me? Do you hear me? Please, please, please hear me.” Even as I write these words, I feel emotions well up. Part of it, perhaps, possibly, calls up a bodily memory of being a newborn, am infant, crying, crying louder, louder still, desperately needing to be responded to, and for any of a host of reasons, not receiving the response needed. Recalling the words of Patricio Ferrari from the event this past Sunday (beautiful! sadly i had to leave early due to a friendly feline slinking around and my overzealous immune response), of the word origin of “ infant” being “unable to speak”, this part of the poem evokes this feeling for me. Trying to be heard; not able to be heard.
This knocking once, twice, this smote (I learned a new word), even harder, also evokes for me the feeling of being unable to reach someone in relationship, as an adult. Two in particular, men I have known, come to mind. Hello, hello? Are you there? Hi. I’m here. Hello??? Please don’t shut me out. Please don’t shut down... do you hear me? Knock knock....
“That I kept my word”
I am not quite sure why this line is the one that crossed me over into tears. Maybe it’s because it evokes a feeling of “I’m sorry, I tried, I really really tried.” Tried but failed.
Those same lines evoke for me a feeling I often have which is that there is this complex mosaic of experience inside of me, and I don’t quite know how to bring expression to it. There is this frustration, a dissatisfaction, a feeling that there is something there, but it isn’t yet born into form… It brings to mind the Zen koan, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” Without a listener, what happens to what’s being said? Ironic that the poet says “I kept my word” and for me this section of the poem speaks to the part of me that often doesn’t have the words.
...
...
Also, I love so much of the language here: “Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house” “...how the silence surged softly backward…”
Thank you, Pádraig for your beautiful and thoughtful sharing and listening. 💫 🙏🏾
Your words, "Trying to be heard; not able to be heard." made me look again at the poem where i noticed that he has only what he feels "in his heart" as evidence of being listened to or heard. And that seems thin evidence when, as we readers of the poem know, it is only ghosts that listen. But how often do we seek to be heard - by more than ghosts - to be left, also, with only a feeling in our hearts that we have been heard? Your reference to that tricky koan makes me stumble, as koans are designed to do, across the boundary of reason and intuition. The traveller is moved by a promise given and seems only to have his private, internal ethic to see this promise fulfilled and to discern if it has been. There is no 'outside' arbiter, no voice to say that the deed is done, to say, "you have been heard." How often do we find ourselves in such a place?
thank you for engaging! and such good questions.. indeed, sometimes we are the only ones who can confirm our own experience. This discussion makes me think of something a teacher once shared - she said that the experience of loneliness is perhaps more about being disconnected from a part of oneself, rather than being disconnected from others. This has me think of the knocking on the door as one’s attempt to know oneself, but not be able to access certain parts.... and yet “something” does listen, does hear, does know.
I missed this response last week as a tidal wave of deadlines swept toward me and i had to leap onto my wobbly surfboard. Alas, still surfing, as it were. I've thought a great deal about the disconnection you describe. And i agree with you and your teacher. It makes me think that the disconnection from others perhaps begins with (or is at least exacerbated by) that disconnection with a part of ourself. This certainly feels true in my experience. I've had to learn that the ensuing loneliness from these disconnections is very different from solitude which, for me, has been the necessary practice to connect with that "something" you say "does listen, does hear, does know."
Thank you, Chris! I resonate so much with how you describe solitude as essential to accessing that, that “something”... and it’s such a dialectic, I think, this need and capacity to connect with others, this need and capacity to connect with ourselves..... Chris, good luck surfing! And if you need to duck dive under some of those waves, may you catch glimpses of mermaids + mermen while you’re down, and some dolphins and seagulls as you re-emerge!
Today, I am appreciating the grounding lines most, the descriptors of what is visible and of the natural world.
“champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor”
Because I like this verb new to me as a native US English speaker (still grinning over how Pádraig used “Englishes” in the overview) - “champed.” And of course the lovely f-f-f alliteration.
And also: “leaf-fringed sill,” another descriptor of what is seen, not imagined.
For me they arouse the senses. The slight foreign-ness of "champing" (to my North American ears) somehow brings the sound of chewing to the fore. And the "forest's ferny floor" holds a play or playfulness of light and shadow and pattern.
It brings to mind a poem I memorized in childhood, John Masefield's Sea-Fever and how the lines gallop apace, how the rhythm and sussuration of consonants remains within me decades later: "I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky..."
These elements of language and the sensory experience of the poem are so keenly linked to memory, and also remind me that poetry can be such an oral delight.
This poem reminds me of Barry Lopez. Often, after writing about a place faraway,, he would say, to the effect, I hope they know how to handle the times ahead.🌱
Having now been immersed in the delicious quiet of VT for two years, I am struck that silence, though truly not total silence for nature is always singing, is sometimes the truest answer when we call out to the universe with our message.
First, thank you for such a wonderful newsletter! I've been quietly reading and enjoying this newsletter but had to comment today. I found this poem in an anthology when I was 12-13 years old and loved it immediately. I think for two reasons, the rhythm of it and because I was reading a lot of fantasy. I've always felt this was a meeting at the border of two worlds, a portal. Now as an adult, I would add a liminal space. And as I think of it, the rhythm of the poem surges in and out like waves. It's a poem that says to me the story isn't finished...
Always wondered about that...why was he awake? Why were the others sleeping? This poem has a lot of unanswered questions... something that I appreciate. There should be mystery in the world. :)
I agree with other commenters on the line “And how the silence surged softly backward” but what struck me was the use of “surge” and “softly” to describe the silence. Something about that combination really caught my attention. I guess I associate “surge” with something loud, imposing, and overwhelming.
I also thought that the softly bubbling horror is made even more pronounced by the repeated use of “Stood” to describe the Phantoms. They “Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight” and they “Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair”. This really gave them agency and a presence that made the poem truly creepy!
this poem gave me chills reading it. good chills and for good reason: it reminded me vividly of many social movements today where someone is crying out for help and many bystanders hear but pretend not to. i can’t say i am not guilty of this also. the reality is haunting (pun intended).
Had chills reading aloud, the room echoing with my voice, this rainy, early, moonlit morning.
This is the verse that resonated the most for me:
"Tell them I came, ...That I kept my word”
It felt like a promise to self, an act of self-inquiry, in hindsight: that the whole poem was a search for the inner truth. The setting, in fact, felt like a mood, rather than a real place.
The phantoms seemed rather Jungian shadows and the Quixotic knocking and smoting on imaginary doors and turrets like a "know thyself" echo.
Now I sit still on the floor, with vision of quests, like that traveler, 'neath the starred sky.
So interesting to imagine all of us who may have read this poem aloud to silence this morning, as you describe. How we are a lonely cacophony of voices!
I loved your interpretation and that line being a promise to the self.
This poem encapsulated for me the inner workings of struggling with guilt or inertia or something that you can’t get past. There are all of these ghosts crowding the front of your consciousness that is not letting the traveler, or present tense voice, through.
The two other lines that also stuck out to me were:
“And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry”
“And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”
The ghosts and the traveler seem to have an idea that each other are there, but the traveler is left unanswered and the silence is met back with silence.
I also want to believe that the promise to self is to find some understanding or inner truth, as you mention
This poem fills me with such sadness. Or, i suppose, brings forth an old sadness that is never far. The lines, "By the lonely Travellers call." and those, I see, chosen by others here: "‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, / That I kept my word,’ he said." Why "lonely"? Who is "them"? What was the promise given? This reminds me so much of the questing visitor in Jorge Luis Borge's The Rose of Paracelsus. That visitor, looking for answers, asks for proof of mystery and leaves worse than disappointed. And I see myself as a child kneeling beside my bed as instructed by my mother and praying to something that I believe listened but which, as far as i could tell, never answered - leaving me worse than lonely. By twelve I lost that mystery - until, after many journeys, I learned again to listen. And though i believe so differently now, I still remember how it felt to believe when, so young, I still thought I was heard.
While there's mystery in his mission, what strikes me is the traveller's honour - not only in a promise kept - even if in vain -- but to himself. And so the word "word" is loaded with inference, and he can continue on his journey with his horse, satisfied that he has, in fact, delivered. Reminds me a bit of Frost's lonely traveller, with promises to keep.
This is such a beautiful poem Padraig- thank you for sharing. It makes me think on the one hand of what some refer to as our species loneliness and on the other hand of our existential longing for kinship, connection and belonging as we journey through life. The traveller knocks on the door of another, calling out for response, in-hears the voices of others, the listeners but can they hear and register his voice? Is there reciprocity? The traveller listens and hears many signs of life from the more than human world but nobody human is at home. I hear the poem as an expression of kinship on the one hand and alienation on the other hand- interestingly the loneliness that is expressed speaks to an absence of response from humankind rather than from the larger universe. There is nobody at home who speaks the language of the traveller, who can hear the traveller calling out and say in response, come inside and make yourself at home. The traveller comes and goes. Paradoxically in the last verse the listeners reveal they have heard the lonely traveller but the “man” is now gone.
Whatever it is, that horrifies us or makes us uneasy, there will be a time, when all this is gone and life will be silent and without fear again. It all comes in waves…
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.”
In addition to the whole snowy silence of the poem, these lines struck me. It makes me think about how our journeys are our journeys and we show up and we keep our integrity regardless of what the result is.
So today, I will show up, show up for myself on this journey of life. Others are welcome to open the door for me when I arrive, but I cannot force the door open, nor shall I make up the stories of why they did not open the door. But I have myself. And the sky. And the journey continues.
Integrity. It is such an important word, such an important commitment. Thank you for sharing this!
Well said, Corie...
Thank you Corie.
Yes, we have ourselves and we show up!
Your interpretation was more steeped in integrity than mine- I think I must be reflecting on my disgenuine self this week
Poems are so interesting. They are our attempt to capture something beyond language with language itself. I think all interpretations have something to teach us. When I was a professor of poetry I presented poems on multiple levels. How was it written, how does it sound, where and when was it written and then there was the discussion of what it evokes for us. So simple and so complex - like life - like a building we can all inhabit.
I would love to take a class from you. 😊 “Poems...are our attempt to capture something beyond language with language itself.” I hadn’t thought of it that way before. No wonder it’s so difficult to write poetry! lol
I love that it can evoke different things
I like the line “ how the silence surged softly backwards” as the poem itself closes. I felt like a listener myself in the end.
I love this line as well. I’m caught up in the mystery of silence surging backwards. From the traveler or the ghosts? I like to visualize it both ways.
I hadn’t considered it that way. I was visualizing the silence as its own entity. Thank you Valerie!
I was surprised how much of this poem I had retained! I can’t remember if I learned it in 6th class in primary school (they had us learning various poems off by heart: The Ballad of Father Gilligan is another one cemented into my mind) or in first year in secondary school.
The line that returns to me ever so often is his cry “Tell them I came and no one answered, that I kept my word”. Maybe it was my adolescent fear of being misunderstood that made that line resonate with me. Or it might have been the burst of noise and life clashing with the silence of the house and the listeners that made it jump out at me.
In any event, thanks for this unexpected Sunday walk down memory lane!
I am with you on this Dylan. That’s the line that resonates with me too. I have been thinking all week about your post last week Padraig on translation. I had a lot of moments this week where I pondered miscommunication, times when the translation is altered...wrong. This reminds me of times where even when I fail at connecting, I want people to know that I tried, which actually feels more selfish than a true desire to connect in some ways.
Yes, Dylan, 'that I kept my word'
So much in that. How often are we too late -, still good to keep
Also, I haven't read out loud just for myself in a long time, I'm glad Padraig nudged us!
I liked 'the sound of iron on stone' !
Thank you
Isn’t that great!? That phrase in particular put me into the poem, making my ears buzz, remembering that sound.
Yes that line jolted some panic in me though I have not read it before
I love this community. I love how reading other people’s comments makes me think deeper about myself and my interpretation. I am now thinking about some relationships where I am not receiving communication from the other side, this is starting to make me think about how I can show up anyway, I still haven’t figured it out yet, but I like the idea that there’s something in the act of showing up. And the reminder and grace that it’s vulnerable and hard.
All you say here resonates with me completely!
Hi Amy, I wrote about this, this week if you want to check it out.
“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.”
At that point in the poem, my throat tightened up and tears came. So moved by this desperation, this knocking, and again, then louder.. a desperation. “Can you hear me? Do you hear me? Please, please, please hear me.” Even as I write these words, I feel emotions well up. Part of it, perhaps, possibly, calls up a bodily memory of being a newborn, am infant, crying, crying louder, louder still, desperately needing to be responded to, and for any of a host of reasons, not receiving the response needed. Recalling the words of Patricio Ferrari from the event this past Sunday (beautiful! sadly i had to leave early due to a friendly feline slinking around and my overzealous immune response), of the word origin of “ infant” being “unable to speak”, this part of the poem evokes this feeling for me. Trying to be heard; not able to be heard.
This knocking once, twice, this smote (I learned a new word), even harder, also evokes for me the feeling of being unable to reach someone in relationship, as an adult. Two in particular, men I have known, come to mind. Hello, hello? Are you there? Hi. I’m here. Hello??? Please don’t shut me out. Please don’t shut down... do you hear me? Knock knock....
“That I kept my word”
I am not quite sure why this line is the one that crossed me over into tears. Maybe it’s because it evokes a feeling of “I’m sorry, I tried, I really really tried.” Tried but failed.
Those same lines evoke for me a feeling I often have which is that there is this complex mosaic of experience inside of me, and I don’t quite know how to bring expression to it. There is this frustration, a dissatisfaction, a feeling that there is something there, but it isn’t yet born into form… It brings to mind the Zen koan, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” Without a listener, what happens to what’s being said? Ironic that the poet says “I kept my word” and for me this section of the poem speaks to the part of me that often doesn’t have the words.
...
...
Also, I love so much of the language here: “Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house” “...how the silence surged softly backward…”
Thank you, Pádraig for your beautiful and thoughtful sharing and listening. 💫 🙏🏾
Your words, "Trying to be heard; not able to be heard." made me look again at the poem where i noticed that he has only what he feels "in his heart" as evidence of being listened to or heard. And that seems thin evidence when, as we readers of the poem know, it is only ghosts that listen. But how often do we seek to be heard - by more than ghosts - to be left, also, with only a feeling in our hearts that we have been heard? Your reference to that tricky koan makes me stumble, as koans are designed to do, across the boundary of reason and intuition. The traveller is moved by a promise given and seems only to have his private, internal ethic to see this promise fulfilled and to discern if it has been. There is no 'outside' arbiter, no voice to say that the deed is done, to say, "you have been heard." How often do we find ourselves in such a place?
thank you for engaging! and such good questions.. indeed, sometimes we are the only ones who can confirm our own experience. This discussion makes me think of something a teacher once shared - she said that the experience of loneliness is perhaps more about being disconnected from a part of oneself, rather than being disconnected from others. This has me think of the knocking on the door as one’s attempt to know oneself, but not be able to access certain parts.... and yet “something” does listen, does hear, does know.
I missed this response last week as a tidal wave of deadlines swept toward me and i had to leap onto my wobbly surfboard. Alas, still surfing, as it were. I've thought a great deal about the disconnection you describe. And i agree with you and your teacher. It makes me think that the disconnection from others perhaps begins with (or is at least exacerbated by) that disconnection with a part of ourself. This certainly feels true in my experience. I've had to learn that the ensuing loneliness from these disconnections is very different from solitude which, for me, has been the necessary practice to connect with that "something" you say "does listen, does hear, does know."
Thank you, Chris! I resonate so much with how you describe solitude as essential to accessing that, that “something”... and it’s such a dialectic, I think, this need and capacity to connect with others, this need and capacity to connect with ourselves..... Chris, good luck surfing! And if you need to duck dive under some of those waves, may you catch glimpses of mermaids + mermen while you’re down, and some dolphins and seagulls as you re-emerge!
Today, I am appreciating the grounding lines most, the descriptors of what is visible and of the natural world.
“champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor”
Because I like this verb new to me as a native US English speaker (still grinning over how Pádraig used “Englishes” in the overview) - “champed.” And of course the lovely f-f-f alliteration.
And also: “leaf-fringed sill,” another descriptor of what is seen, not imagined.
These two lines struck me too!
For me they arouse the senses. The slight foreign-ness of "champing" (to my North American ears) somehow brings the sound of chewing to the fore. And the "forest's ferny floor" holds a play or playfulness of light and shadow and pattern.
It brings to mind a poem I memorized in childhood, John Masefield's Sea-Fever and how the lines gallop apace, how the rhythm and sussuration of consonants remains within me decades later: "I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky..."
These elements of language and the sensory experience of the poem are so keenly linked to memory, and also remind me that poetry can be such an oral delight.
Very lovely sharing of the Sea-Fever. Thank you for adding your memories and insights.
What an ecosystem, so beautifully rendered.
This poem reminds me of Barry Lopez. Often, after writing about a place faraway,, he would say, to the effect, I hope they know how to handle the times ahead.🌱
yes! Barry Lopez: “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
Having now been immersed in the delicious quiet of VT for two years, I am struck that silence, though truly not total silence for nature is always singing, is sometimes the truest answer when we call out to the universe with our message.
I will be moving to VT soon! Greetings, new neighbor!
First, thank you for such a wonderful newsletter! I've been quietly reading and enjoying this newsletter but had to comment today. I found this poem in an anthology when I was 12-13 years old and loved it immediately. I think for two reasons, the rhythm of it and because I was reading a lot of fantasy. I've always felt this was a meeting at the border of two worlds, a portal. Now as an adult, I would add a liminal space. And as I think of it, the rhythm of the poem surges in and out like waves. It's a poem that says to me the story isn't finished...
Love the liminal space conclusion for it does feel like a portal. The line that confirms it for me is:
From the one man left awake/ Such a weighted line.
Always wondered about that...why was he awake? Why were the others sleeping? This poem has a lot of unanswered questions... something that I appreciate. There should be mystery in the world. :)
Love yoir observation of the ecosystem of this poem as a liminal space.
I see it as liminal space as well, Deb.
I agree with other commenters on the line “And how the silence surged softly backward” but what struck me was the use of “surge” and “softly” to describe the silence. Something about that combination really caught my attention. I guess I associate “surge” with something loud, imposing, and overwhelming.
I also thought that the softly bubbling horror is made even more pronounced by the repeated use of “Stood” to describe the Phantoms. They “Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight” and they “Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair”. This really gave them agency and a presence that made the poem truly creepy!
this poem gave me chills reading it. good chills and for good reason: it reminded me vividly of many social movements today where someone is crying out for help and many bystanders hear but pretend not to. i can’t say i am not guilty of this also. the reality is haunting (pun intended).
Had chills reading aloud, the room echoing with my voice, this rainy, early, moonlit morning.
This is the verse that resonated the most for me:
"Tell them I came, ...That I kept my word”
It felt like a promise to self, an act of self-inquiry, in hindsight: that the whole poem was a search for the inner truth. The setting, in fact, felt like a mood, rather than a real place.
The phantoms seemed rather Jungian shadows and the Quixotic knocking and smoting on imaginary doors and turrets like a "know thyself" echo.
Now I sit still on the floor, with vision of quests, like that traveler, 'neath the starred sky.
‘Is there anybody there?’
I am here.
So interesting to imagine all of us who may have read this poem aloud to silence this morning, as you describe. How we are a lonely cacophony of voices!
I loved your interpretation and that line being a promise to the self.
This poem encapsulated for me the inner workings of struggling with guilt or inertia or something that you can’t get past. There are all of these ghosts crowding the front of your consciousness that is not letting the traveler, or present tense voice, through.
The two other lines that also stuck out to me were:
“And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry”
“And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”
The ghosts and the traveler seem to have an idea that each other are there, but the traveler is left unanswered and the silence is met back with silence.
I also want to believe that the promise to self is to find some understanding or inner truth, as you mention
Beautiful! Thanks for sharing, Amelia.
This poem fills me with such sadness. Or, i suppose, brings forth an old sadness that is never far. The lines, "By the lonely Travellers call." and those, I see, chosen by others here: "‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, / That I kept my word,’ he said." Why "lonely"? Who is "them"? What was the promise given? This reminds me so much of the questing visitor in Jorge Luis Borge's The Rose of Paracelsus. That visitor, looking for answers, asks for proof of mystery and leaves worse than disappointed. And I see myself as a child kneeling beside my bed as instructed by my mother and praying to something that I believe listened but which, as far as i could tell, never answered - leaving me worse than lonely. By twelve I lost that mystery - until, after many journeys, I learned again to listen. And though i believe so differently now, I still remember how it felt to believe when, so young, I still thought I was heard.
Such a tender and powerful memory you shared here, Chris...
makes me think of the longing, the ache to know (and to be known), and yet perhaps the path is in being with the unknown, the mystery as you say....
your final line is exquisite.
A sweet story, Chris about your journey. I can relate…in so many ways.
While there's mystery in his mission, what strikes me is the traveller's honour - not only in a promise kept - even if in vain -- but to himself. And so the word "word" is loaded with inference, and he can continue on his journey with his horse, satisfied that he has, in fact, delivered. Reminds me a bit of Frost's lonely traveller, with promises to keep.
Yeah, I noted the connection with Frost as well.
This is such a beautiful poem Padraig- thank you for sharing. It makes me think on the one hand of what some refer to as our species loneliness and on the other hand of our existential longing for kinship, connection and belonging as we journey through life. The traveller knocks on the door of another, calling out for response, in-hears the voices of others, the listeners but can they hear and register his voice? Is there reciprocity? The traveller listens and hears many signs of life from the more than human world but nobody human is at home. I hear the poem as an expression of kinship on the one hand and alienation on the other hand- interestingly the loneliness that is expressed speaks to an absence of response from humankind rather than from the larger universe. There is nobody at home who speaks the language of the traveller, who can hear the traveller calling out and say in response, come inside and make yourself at home. The traveller comes and goes. Paradoxically in the last verse the listeners reveal they have heard the lonely traveller but the “man” is now gone.
beautiful!! thank you, Heidi.
Thank you for taking time to read and respond.
So well expressed!🌱
That is very kind and generous of you to say and share.
„And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.“
Whatever it is, that horrifies us or makes us uneasy, there will be a time, when all this is gone and life will be silent and without fear again. It all comes in waves…