Elizabeth Madox Roberts was born in Perryville, Kentucky, in 1881, grew up in the central part of the state, and before she became known for novels such as The Time of Man, she published Under the Tree in 1922. That collection drew on the remembered textures of a rural Kentucky childhood at a time when Southern writers were beginning to treat the countryside not as a decorative backdrop but as a place of psychological depth. “Strange Tree” belongs to that imaginative world: a child walking along a road past the Jarboe house sees a tree that seems to return the gaze. The central idea is not simply that nature can be frightening. Roberts captures the moment when a child’s animistic imagination erases the boundary between object and living presence, making the familiar road suddenly strange.
The poem is constructed as four ballad-like quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme, so the second and fourth lines chime in a way that feels close to children’s verse. The unrhymed first and third lines keep the pattern from feeling too neat, so the chiming second and fourth lines land with quiet force. That sing-song familiarity is part of the poem’s power. The opening line, “Away beyond the Jarboe house,” has a steady walking rhythm, as if the speaker is moving easily through a known neighborhood. But the phrase “a different kind of tree” quietly signals a departure, and the last line of the first stanza, “And I could feel it look at me,” turns sight into something physical. Across the poem, the phrase “look at me” repeats like a refrain, so a passing impression becomes an obsession. The rhyme and rhythm remain calm even as the content grows more unsettled, and in the third stanza the abrupt short line “Were bent and dark” breaks the pattern, creating a held-breath finality.
The imagery makes the tree both familiar and alien. It is “old and large and bent,” words that suggest age, bodily weight, and even injury. Roberts does not give the tree a human face; instead, she writes, “It looked at me with all its limbs; / It looked at me with all its bark.” The word “limbs” hovers between branches and human arms and legs, while “bark” draws attention to the tree’s rough skin. The “yellow wrinkles on its sides” could be bark or aged flesh, and the dark bent lines make the tree seem less like a plant than an old creature watching from the roadside. Even the road participates in the strangeness: it “was going on and on / Beyond to reach some other place,” placing the child on a threshold between the known and the unknown. The Jarboe house is the last marker of human order; beyond it, the tree can behave in ways the ordinary world should not allow.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to explain the experience. Roberts never says the vision was merely a trick of light or a child’s fear, nor does she confirm that the tree truly moved. The final image—“The tree was bending to the side / And leaning out to look at me”—leaves the event suspended between fact and imagination. That ambiguity is faithful to the way children experience the world, not as a fixed set of objects but as a field of possible presences. The simple ballad form keeps the poem from feeling overwrought; the unease grows because the language stays so plain. “Strange Tree” remains memorable because it gives a gaze, not a face, to an ordinary tree and lets that gaze follow the reader long after the child has run away.