The poetic trees of Joyce Kilmer

Joyce Kilmer was born 125 years ago this month. I will not be lighting any candles. I grew to dislike Kilmer as a child, and have only recently grown more tolerant.

Kilmer, for those who may not know, wrote poetry. The best known of Kilmer’s verses is “Trees,” first published in 1913.  

Every member of my 8th grade class was given a poem and a few days to memorize it. We then took turns going to the front of the room and making a recitation. My assignment was “Trees.” Memorizing things was generally not difficult. I can still do “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” but Sam McGee was a far cry from “Trees.”

“I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree.”

Cramming the skinny, frozen corpse of Sam McGee into a fire-box and throwing on coal made for great reading. “Trees” did not.  

But I memorized the thing. “A tree whose lovely mouth is pressed/against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.”  I gagged, but I did it and recited it and got a passing grade and that should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. The words refused to go away.   

For half a century that cursed poem has periodically entered my awareness, haunted my dreams and robbed me of sleep.

This morning, at about 4 a.m., it returned. I arose, turned on the computer, and began to search.

If I knew more about Joyce Kilmer perhaps I could drive her inane poem from my mind.  

All these years I’d assumed Kilmer was a frumpy old woman, probably a tree-hugging vegetarian bird-watcher.

Robert Service, who wrote “Sam McGee” and other verses about life and death in the gold-rush Yukon, was a hardy outdoorsman who braved the frigid wilderness and lived to tell about it. Joyce Kilmer, who wrote the sappiest poem I’d ever read, was surely the opposite.

The online photograph revealed a handsome, mustachioed young man. He was wearing a World War I uniform. Joyce Kilmer was a man, a war hero who’d faced dangers Robert Service had not.

I read on, and then came a Montgomery County connection. When the history center opened I made a visit to be sure. July 28, 1918, was a dark day for Company M.

Two Montgomery County boys were killed, several others severely wounded. Members of the Rainbow Division, their young lives ended near the Ourcq River during the Marne offensive.

A day later, as the battle continued, Sgt. Joyce Kilmer, a member of the same division, was shot through the head.

He fell not far from where a boy from Grant and one from Red Oak had died just hours earlier.

The three were among those buried, as another poem has it, in Flanders Field.

I read more of Kilmer’s poetry. Nearly all conveyed the same drippy, simplistic theme as “Trees” and I wondered why.

“Trees” became popular, but most of what he wrote was dismissed. Today hardly anyone reads Joyce Kilmer.  

Perhaps his poetry can be explained. Kilmer, a few years before the war, married the love of his life. He and his wife were thrilled by the birth of a daughter. They named her Rose.

Rose, the center of Kilmer’s existence, contracted polio while still a toddler.

Paralyzed, she withered and lingered for only a few years. Her death came a short time before his.

Kilmer wrote poems for the little girl, and read them to her.  I still don’t care for “Trees,” but have more appreciation than before.

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.