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Nature Poetry

As a poem that communicates reverence for the natural world, “Trees” stands in a long tradition of poetry devoted to nature. This tradition goes back to the pastoral poetry of Greek and Roman antiquity. Written by poets from urban centers, pastoral poems projected idealized images of the peaceful simplicity of shepherds’ lives in rural nature. Although pastoral poetry fell out of favor in the Middle Ages, it made a resurgence in the Renaissance and remained popular among neoclassical poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the British Romantic poets departed from typical depictions of pastoral nature. Instead of depending on highly idealized conventions for portraying rural life, the Romantics sought to develop more personalized depictions of the natural world. Each in their different way, Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Shelley explored their own unique emotional and philosophical responses to nature’s beauty and sublimity. Across the Atlantic, the American Transcendentalists took a similarly serious approach to representing the relationship between humans and nature. Poets like Walt Whitman and philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson reframed the natural world as a wildly beautiful and divinely inspired frontier.

Devotional Poetry

Although “Trees” is a poem that expresses a reverent attitude toward the natural world, that reverence is underwritten by the speaker’s enduring faith in God. Thus, as a poem about the wondrous nature of Creation, “Trees” must also be understood as a work of devotional poetry. This category of poetry is vast and varied, and it includes any verse that expresses an attitude of religious worship or prayer. Many religious traditions have given rise to devotional poetry, but given Kilmer’s Catholic faith, “Trees” must be situated specifically in the Christian tradition. The earliest devotional poetry in the Christian tradition appears in the Bible, many of whose books are written in verse. The Middle Ages witnessed an explosion of devotional poetry, uses for which ranged from personal prayer to public worship. However, with the increasing secularization of the nineteenth century, devotional poetry lost much of its popular appeal. Even so, religious poets continued to use verse as a medium for reflecting on the grandeur of God and his Creation. Perhaps the most notable figure in this context was the Victorian Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit poet who wrote with startling originality about the marvels of the natural world. Kilmer carried this same tradition into the twentieth century.

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