A garden can be a boundary, and Anna Wickham’s “The Trespasser” begins with something already inside it. Wickham, born Edith Alice Mary Harper in 1883, was an early twentieth-century British poet whose work often grew out of the friction between domestic expectation and a stubborn imaginative life. She married young, raised children, and wrote in the margins of domestic duty; restlessness and defiance pulse through much of her work. She wrote in the years around the First World War and the 1920s, when women poets were still frequently treated as visitors in a male literary world. In that context, a poem about a small, wicked creature who breaks into a private garden carries a special charge.
The four lines describe a speaker who notices “a little goblin in my tree,” a creature that “sits up high and mows” at her—grimacing or mocking from the branches. Although he is “so wicked, yet so small,” his presence has a transformative effect: “He makes my garden venturous, and my trees tall.” The central idea is not that trespass ruins a place, but that a small intrusion can enlarge it. The goblin may be a figure for the uninvited thought, the mischievous impulse, or the creative urge that disregards the neat boundaries of a well-kept life. Wickham treats him as both intruder and benefactor, and the poem’s energy comes from that paradox.
The construction is deliberately simple on the surface. Two rhyming couplets—tree/me and small/tall—give the verse a nursery-rhyme predictability, as if a child were naming something both alarming and delightful. The couplets sound almost like a skipping rhyme, yet they carry an adult argument about land, permission, and appetite. The metre does not stay fixed. The opening line runs fairly comfortably in iambic pentameter, the second and third tighten into tetrameter, and the final line stretches to eleven syllables as it describes the garden becoming venturous and the trees growing tall. The expansion of the line acts out the expansion the goblin causes. Even the rhyme between “small” and “tall” insists that opposites belong together: smallness is the source of height.
Wickham’s imagery hinges on words of ownership and scale. The speaker says “my tree” and “my garden,” establishing a domestic territory, then lets the goblin occupy it without permission. The word “mows” is quietly perfect—not a grand act of destruction, but a rude face, a human-sized gesture of defiance from something tiny. “Venturous” is the most important choice in the poem. It does not say that the garden becomes beautiful, safe, or fruitful; it says the garden becomes bold. That single adjective turns a piece of private ground into a space of risk and possibility. Meanwhile, the final phrase shifts from the first line’s singular “tree” to a plural “trees,” as if one small trespass has multiplied the speaker’s world.
Wickham often wrote about women’s anger and desire as forces that could not be safely tidied away, and the goblin belongs to that same current. What makes these four lines significant is their miniature argument for the value of disruption. Wickham does not ask permission to feel wicked or to imagine something beyond the garden wall. Instead, she gives the smallest possible intruder the power to make a whole landscape taller. In an era when women’s lives were often enclosed by the home, that is a quietly radical position. The goblin is not expelled, punished, or moralised about; he is allowed to sit up high and keep mowing, because the garden is better—wilder, taller, more venturous—with him in it.