‘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.
Walter de la Mare
Si yo pudiera convencerte, madre
de que no es malo caminar a solas
que sólo en el silencio entiendo todo
y que me arrulla la vida, palpitante,
cuando no hay más testigos.
El collado, por Emilio González Sáinz
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