Tennyson's landscapes include denes — the narrow wooded valleys of the English countryside — as places of quiet enclosure, shelter from wind and broader view, spaces of intimacy within open landscapes; A poet might write "the dene held the stream in its cupped hands, the old trees leaning inward above the water, making a green tunnel through the summer heat"; The place-name suffix "-den" or "-dene" preserves these wooded valleys in thousands of English village names, and poets alert to etymology can hear in a place name the description of the landscape it once was; In elegies for lost English woodland, the dene appears as the survivor — the valley too steep and narrow for the plough, where the ancient trees persisted while the surrounding hillside was cleared; Edward Thomas walked through denes on many of his Hampshire and Wiltshire journeys, and his poems attend to the particular quality of these enclosed, moist, ferny valleys with their running streams and overhanging trees; The dene's enclosure — the way the valley walls create a world apart from the surrounding open landscape — gives it associations with concealment, intimacy, and the preservation of what has been lost from more exposed places.