The Listeners Poem

The poems “The Listeners” and “Beware: Do Not Read This Poem” haven’t many similarities, but one major one can be found: both create a sense of immersion. You feel as though you are there, in the poem yourself. However, they do this in separate ways. “The Listeners” mainly uses two senses to build an image in the reader’s mind, sight and sound. You can see “the forest’s ferny floor” and the “moonlit door” and hear “the sound of iron on stone” as the Traveler leaves the house. You can also feel a sense of loneliness as the Traveler speaks to the “phantom listeners”. The poem has a story to tell, and you are there to witness it, like the listeners who cannot say a word. “Beware: Do Not Read This Poem” uses a different kind of imagery. It uses mostly the sense of feeling. It tells you that the poem “has drawn in yr feet”, and goes on to tell you that the “poem is the reader and the reader this poem”. This sense of feeling also gives you the feeling that you are a part of the …show more content…
The differences are the kind of imagery that they do use. In one poem, the senses are sight and sound, as opposed to feeling. They are also both very different in their formatting. “The Listeners” has a flowy, story-like kind of format, while “Beware: Do Not Read This Poem” is more of a choppy poem with short lines, and quickly changes in its style, from a story, to a more intense part, to a fact. All in all, “The Listeners” and “Beware: Do Not Read This Poem” have almost nothing in common, but the one thing that they do have in common is something very important. Both are stories about completely different things and have completely different tones, but you feel as if you are in the poems yourself because of the imagery in them. In conclusion, imagery is very important to all pieces of literature, not only poems, because they give the reader a sense of immersion into the