part0022

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was a prolific author of poetry, novels and short fiction who is mainly remembered for ‘The Listeners’, Britain’s third favourite poem, according to a poll by the BBC. The poem’s appeal resides in the air of mystery that de la Mare creates around the empty house and the traveller’s uncertain mission. Although the unexplained existential drama is the heart of the poem, it is worth remembering that ‘The Listeners’ is also a woodland poem: while the traveller is busy knocking on the moonlit door, his horse champs the “grasses/ Of the forest’s ferny floor”. De la Mare could write more jauntily about trees too. His poem titled simply ‘Trees’ is a chirpy and rather slight piece about the virtues of different English trees that lacks the enigmatic qualities of ‘The Listeners’. De la Mare, not unlike Edith Nesbit, was a writer of many moods and modes; his acclaimed horror fiction is one of the lesser known parts of his oeuvre.

‘The Tree’ was published in 1922 as part of The Riddle and Other Stories . As with ‘The Listeners’, the narrative’s location is never exactly specified; all we know is that the Fruit Merchant at the centre of the tale arrives at a station at the end of a “feebly patronised” train line. The accents of the characters would seem to suggest a setting somewhere in the south of England, but the deliberate vagueness of the location is part of the story’s power: ‘The Tree’ doesn’t so much have a setting as much as an atmosphere. While many of the stories in this collection reveal deeply local histories—both real and imagined—‘The Tree’ encourages a sense of the British landscape as formed through the wider geographies of empire and global capital. The Fruit Merchant makes his living bringing exotic species to Britain’s markets. The story’s eponymous tree, like many trees in Britain, is an introduced or perhaps even an invasive species; its uncanny presence in the landscape suggests something of the anxieties that formed part of the self-consciousness of imperial Britain in the early twentieth century.