Walter de la Mare’s “The Three Cherry Trees” unfolds like a half-remembered song. It tells of a garden where three cherry trees grew in shade, where a beautiful lady walked and dreamed, where blackbirds, throstles, and linnets sang. Then summer came, a lover “charmed that lady away,” and the garden decayed into moss, lichen, and weeds. Yet at the close a “light footstep seems there to wander in dreams,” the ghost of that happy, beautiful lady. The central idea is not simply loss but the strange persistence of beauty: the garden’s centre of delight has become a ghostly afterimage, and memory preserves the lady more than the trees themselves could.
The poem’s construction makes this haunting feel musical rather than morbid. Each five-line stanza uses a loose, songlike rhyme, often returning to the same sound at the end: “shady” chimes with “lady,” “linnet” is echoed by “within it,” “slender” with “tender.” This echo is not incidental. The final line of each stanza repeats or nearly repeats a phrase from before, as if the poem itself wanders back through its own garden. The rhythm moves between iambic and anapestic feet; the third line of the first stanza, “And there for delight of so gladsome a sight,” gathers extra syllables into a lilting, dance-like movement, then settles into “Walked a most beautiful lady.” That shift from a crowded, gladsome line to a calm one enacts the lady’s presence as a kind of still centre.
Imagery carries the story’s quiet transformation. The first stanza gives us a “garden all shady,” a phrase that returns near the end in “paths green and shady,” binding the poem in a circle of green shadow. The birds named in the second stanza—blackbird, throstle, and linnet—are not decorative; they root the scene in ordinary English songbirds, so the comparison “she walking there was by far the most fair” feels earned. The poem says she was lovelier than all else “within it,” and then repeats the bird names: “Blackbird and throstle and linnet.” The repeated names become a fading chorus, as though the birds are already turning into memory. In the third stanza, “blossoms to berries do come” is a plain, folk-like way of saying that ripeness implies change. The lover’s vows are “sweet and merry and tender,” and “tender” repeats, lingering like a voice that has not quite gone.
The final stanza does not describe a visible ghost. Instead it offers a sound and a half-belief: “a light footstep seems there to wander in dreams.” The word “seems” is essential. The poem does not claim the lady is literally present; it claims only that the place holds the impression of her happiness. “Moss and lichen the green branches deck” uses “deck” strangely, as if decay can also adorn. Weeds “nod,” alive in the absence of the one who once walked there. The ghost is called “that happy and beautiful lady,” not a sorrowful or frightening one. That choice makes the poem significant: it does not separate joy from loss. The lady’s beauty, the singing birds, the cherry blossoms, and the lover’s tenderness all pass, yet their echo remains in the green shade. De la Mare leaves the reader with a footstep that is not seen, only imagined—a memory that has become part of the garden’s atmosphere.