Trees (poem): Difference between revisions

This article is about the 1913 poem by American poet Joyce Kilmer. For other uses, see Tree (disambiguation).

Joyce Kilmer's Columbia University yearbook photograph, circa 1908

"Trees" is a lyric poem written in February 1913 by American poet Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918). It was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in August 1913, and included in Kilmer's collection Trees and Other Poems published the following year.

"Trees" is the poem for which Kilmer is most remembered and its familiarity has made it the subject of frequent parodies and references in popular culture. Kilmer's work is often disparaged by critics and ignored by scholars as being too simple, overly sentimental, and suggested that his style was far too traditional, even archaic. Despite this, the popular appeal of this simple poem is likely the source of its endurance. Literary critic Guy Davenport remarked that "Trees" is "the one poem known by practically everybody." The poem is frequently found in poetry anthologies and has been set to music several times—including renditions by Oscar Rasbach, Nelson Eddy, Robert Merrill and Paul Robeson.

Several locations and institutions connected to Kilmer's life have claimed that a specific tree located there was the inspiration for Kilmer's poem—among these include Kilmer's alma mater Rutgers University (where he attended for two years), and the University of Notre Dame, and the town of Mahwah in New Jersey (where he lived for several years). However, Kilmer's eldest son, Kenton (1909–1995), declares that the poem does not apply to any one particular tree and could apply to any tree. The poem was written in an upstairs bedroom at the family's home in Mahwah that "looked out down a hill, on our well-wooded lawn." Ironically, Kenton Kilmer points out that while his father was "widely known for his affection for trees, his affection was certainly not sentimental - the most distinguished feature of Kilmer's property was a colossal woodpile outside his home."

The poem

The cover of Joyce Kilmer's Trees and Other Poems, published in 1914

Scansion and analysis

The text stated below is the original written in 1913 by Kilmer.

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

"Trees" has twelve lines of eight syllables in strict iambic tetrameter. The poem's rhyme scheme is rhyming couplets rendered aa bb cc dd ee aa.

Despite its deceptive simplicity in rhyme and meter, "Trees" is notable for its use of personification and anthropomorphic imagery: the tree of the poem, which Kilmer depicts as female, is depicted as pressing its mouth to the Earth's breast, looking at God, and raising its "leafy arms" to pray. The tree of the poem also has human physical attributes — it has a "hungry mouth", arms, hair (in which robins nest), and a bosom. Scholar Mark Royden Winchell points out that Kilmer's depiction of the trees indicate the possibility that he had several different people in mind because of the variety of anthropomorphic descriptions because if it were to be a single human being it would be "an anatomically deformed one."

"In the second stanza, the tree is a sucking babe drawing nourishment from Mother Earth; in the third it is a supplicant reaching its leafy arms to the sky in prayer....In the fourth stanza, the tree is a girl with jewels (a nest of robins) in her hair; and in the fifth, it is a chaste woman living alone with nature and with God. There is no warrant in the poem to say that it is different trees that remind the poet of these different types of people.

However, Winchell observes that this "series of fanciful analogies...could be presented in any order without damaging the overall structure of his poem."

The writing of "Trees"

Joyce Kilmer's reputation as a poet is staked largely on the widespread popularity of this one poem. According to Kilmer's oldest son, Kenton, "Trees" was written on 2 February 1913 when the family resided in Mahwah, New Jersey in the northwestern corner of Bergen County. The Kilmers lived on Airmont Road in Mahwah for five years and the house overlooked the Ramapo Valley.

It was written in the afternoon in the intervals of some other writing. The desk was in an upstairs room, by a window looking down a wooded hill. It was written in a little notebook in which his father and mother wrote out copies of several of their poems, and, in most cases, added the date of composition. On one page the first two lines of 'Trees' appear, with the date, February 2, 1913, and on another page, further on in the book, is the full text of the poem. It was dedicated to his wife's mother, Mrs. Henry Mills Alden, who was endeared to all her family.

Recently, Kilmer's notebook alluded to by his son Kenton was discovered in Georgetown University's Lauinger Library in a collection of papers donated to the university by Kilmer's granddaughter, Miriam Kilmer.The "Mrs. Henry Mills Alden" to whom the poem was dedicated was Ada Foster Murray Alden (1866–1936), the mother of Kilmer's wife, Aline Murray Kilmer (1888–1941). Alden, a writer, had married Harper's Magazine editor Henry Mills Alden in 1900.

"Trees" was first published in the August 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse which had begun publishing the year before in Chicago, Illinois. Poetry paid Kilmer six dollars to print the poem. The following year, Kilmer included "Trees" in a collection of poems titled Trees and Other Poems (1914).

Inspiration for the poem

Many locations including Rutgers University (where Kilmer attended for two years), University of Notre Dame, as well as historians in Mahwah, New Jersey and in other places, have boasted that a specific tree was the inspiration for Kilmer's poem. However, Kenton Kilmer (1909-1995), the poet's eldest son, refutes these claims, remarking that,

"Mother and I agreed, when we talked about it, that Dad never meant his poem to apply to one particular tree, or to the trees of any special region. Just any trees or all trees that might be rained on or snowed on, and that would be suitable nesting places for robins. I guess they'd have to have upward-reaching branches, too, for the line about 'lifting leafy arms to pray.' Rule out weeping willows."

According to Kilmer's son, Kenton, the poem—which was not inspired by any specific tree but about trees in general—was written

"...in an upstairs bedroom... which served as Mother's and Dad's bedroom and also as Dad's office.... The window looked out down a hill, on our well-wooded lawn - trees of many kinds, from mature trees to thin saplings: oaks, maples, black and white birches, and I do not know what else."

However, a 1915 interview with Kilmer...

"pointed out that while Kilmer might be widely known for his affection for trees, his affection was certainly not sentimental - the most distinguished feature of Kilmer's property was a colossal woodpile outside his home. The house stood in the middle of a forest and what lawn it possessed was obtained only after Kilmer had spent months of weekend toil in chopping down trees, pulling up stumps, and splitting logs. Kilmer's neighbors had difficulty in believing that a man who could do that could also be a poet."

Many locations across the United States maintain legends that certain trees in their localities inspired Kilmer to write the poem. Most noted among them is the tradition in Kilmer's birthplace, New Brunswick, New Jersey, which states that Kilmer wrote the poem "Trees" after a large white oak (Quercus alba) tree that was located on the outskirts of town on the campus of Cook College (now known as the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences), at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. This tree, estimated to be over three hundred years old, was so weakened by age and disease that it had to be removed in 1963. Currently, saplings from acorns of the historic tree are being grown at the site, throughout the Middlesex County area, and in major arboretums around the United States. The remains of the original Kilmer Oak are currently kept in storage at Rutgers University.

Guy Davenport suggests quite a different inspiration.

"Trees were favorite symbols for Yeats, Frost, and even the young Pound. [ . . . ] But Kilmer had been reading about trees in another context[,] the movement to stop child labor and set up nursery schools in slums. [ . . . ] Margaret McMillan . . . had the happy idea that a breath of fresh air and an intimate acquaintance with grass and trees were worth all the pencils and desks in the whole school system. [ . . . ] The English word for gymnasium equipment is 'apparatus.' And in her book Labour and Childhood (1907) you will find this sentence: 'Apparatus can be made by fools, but only God can make a tree.'

However, as this quotation cannot be found in McMillan's book, Davenport must be in error here.

Legacy

Critical reception and popular appeal

The Joyce Kilmer Tree in New York City's Central Park, located near several World War I monuments. This tree which was planted after Kilmer's death is not one of the many trees claimed to be the inspiration for the poem.

Kilmer's poetry was influenced by his "His strong religious faith and dedication to the natural beauty of the world." Despite the enduring popular appeal of "Trees", most of Joyce Kilmer's works are largely unknown and have fallen into obscurity. A select few of his poems, including "Trees", are published frequently in anthologies. "Trees" began appearing in anthologies shortly after Kilmer's 1918 death, the first inclusion being Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry (1919). The enduring popularity of this poem is evinced by its association with annual Arbor Day observances, the frequently planting of memorial trees or the several parks named in honour of Kilmer, including the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness and Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest tracts within the Nantahala National Forest in Graham County, North Carolina.

"Trees" has been described by literary critic Guy Davenport as "the one poem known by practically everybody." According to journalist Rick Hampson, "Trees" was "memorized and recited by generations of students....It comforted troops in the trenches of World War I. It was set to music and set in stone, declaimed in opera houses and vaudeville theaters, intoned at ceremonies each April on Arbor Day." According to Robert Holliday, Kilmer's friend and editor, "Trees" speaks "with authentic song to the simplest of hearts" and that "(t)he exquisite title poem now so universally known, made his reputation more than all the rest he had written put together. That impeccable lyric which made for immediate widespread popularity." Its popularity has also led to parodies of the poem—some by noted poets and writers. The pattern of its first its first lines (I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.) is of seemingly simple rhyme and meter and easy to mimic along with the poem's choice of metaphors. Indeed, blogger Mark Forsyth, ranks the first two lines of "Trees" as 26th out of 50 lines in an assessment of the "most quoted lines of poetry" as measured by Google hits.

Several critics—including both Kilmer's contemporaries and modern scholars—have disparaged Kilmer's work as being too simple, overly sentimental, and suggested that his style was far too traditional, even archaic. Indeed, the entire corpus of Kilmer's work was produced between 1909 and 1918 when Romanticism and sentimental lyric poetry fell out of favor and Modernism took root—especially with the influence of the Lost Generation. Kilmer can be considered among the last of the Romantic era poets because his verse is conservative and traditional in style and does not break any of the formal rules of poetics--a style often criticized today because for being too sentimental to be taken seriously. In the years after Kilmer's death, poetry went in drastically different directions, as is seen especially in the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and academic criticism grew with it to eschew the more sentimental and straightforward verse. Despite this, the popular appeal of the poem continued—much to the chagrin of critics. The poem was severely criticized by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their popular textbook Understanding Poetry first published in 1938. Brooks and Warren were two of the major contributors to the New Criticism movement which analyzed poetry solely on its objective aesthetic formulae and excluded reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. They attributed the popularity of trees to its appeal

"to a stock response that has nothing to do, as such, with poetry. It praises God and appeals to a religious sentiment Therefore, people who do not stop to look at the poem itself or to study the images in the poem and think about what the poem really says, are inclined to accept the poem because of the pious sentiment, the prettified little pictures (which in themselves appeal to stock responses), and the mechanical rhythm.

According to scholar Mark Royden Winchell, Brooks and Warren's criticism of Kilmer's poem was chiefly to demonstrate that "it is sometimes possible to learn as much about poetry from bad poems as from good ones."

Musical adaptations

"Trees" has been given several musical settings that were quite popular in the 1940s and 1950s, the most popular written by Nelson Eddy, Robert Merrill and Paul Robeson.

The subject of parodies

Because of the varied reception to Kilmer's poem, and it's simple rhyme and meter, it has been the model for several parodies written by humorists and poets alike. While keeping with Kilmer's iambic tetrameter rhythm and its couplet rhyme scheme, and references to the original poem's thematic material, such parodies are often immediately recognizable, as is seen in the parody written by poet and humorist Ogden Nash:

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall,

I'll never see a tree at all.

"Chee$e"

I think that we should never freeze
Such lively assets as our cheese.
The sucker's hungry mouth is pressed
Against the cheese's caraway breast.
(...)
Poems are nought but warmed-up breeze.
DOLLARS are made by Trappist Cheese.

Further, Trappist monk, poet and spiritual writer Thomas Merton (1915–1968) used Kilmer's poem as a model for a parody called "Chee$e"—with a dollar sign purposefully substituted for the letter "s"—in which Merton ridiculed the lucrative sale of homemade cheese by his monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. This poem was not published during Merton's lifetime. Merton often criticized the "commodification of monastic life and business for a profit", claiming that it affected the well-being of the spirit. It is also noted that Merton was a graduate of Columbia University, Kilmer's alma mater, and like Kilmer was a member university's literary society Philolexian Society which has an annual memorial "bad poetry contest" named in Kilmer's honour. In his poem, which he described as "A Christmas Card for Brother Cellarer" and Merton attributed it to "Joyce Killer-Diller."

In the Our Gang short "Arbor Day," Alfalfa, after the cue in a Woodsman-spare-that-tree exchange with Spanky, sings "Trees," in what Leonard Maltin called "the poem's all-time worst rendition," with his whiny, strained voice.

In his album Caught in the Act, Victor Borge, at one point, when playing requests, says, "Sorry I don't know that 'Doggie in the Window'. I know one that comes pretty close to it." Then he starts to play "Trees."

"Trees" was popularised in 1948 by the eponym segment of Melody Time, an animated feature produced by Walt Disney, and also in the 1980 film Superman II, of which there are two versions, one directed by Richard Donner and one directed by Richard Lester . Donner's original version, belatedly released in 2006, has Marlon Brando reading Kilmer's poem. These scenes had been shot in April 1977. Lester had British actor John Hollis reprise Brando's role in July 1979, and it is he who appears in the original 1980 theatrical release. When Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor cuts short the recitation, his assistant Miss Teshmocker, played by Valerie Perrine, protests, "I like Trees." Luthor responds, "So does your average cocker spaniel."

In a 1968 episode of the Wacky Races cartoon series, the villainous character Dick Dastardly, in using a tree he'd chopped down as a roadblock against the other racers, says, "I think that I shall never see/A roadblock lovely as a tree."

See also

• List of places named after Joyce Kilmer

External links

• Reelyredd's Poetry Pages audio version of "Trees" (with James Stewart voice impression)
• The Poems of Joyce Kilmer (1918)