Joyce Kilmer, who was a key figure in the American Catholic community in the early twentieth century, is remembered today mainly because of his short devotional poem, “Trees.” Kilmer wrote the poem one February day in 1913 in the upstairs bedroom at his family’s home in Mahwah, New Jersey. Looking out on the forested property, Kilmer composed a tightly structured poem consisting of six rhyming couplets in which the anonymous speaker claims that no poem could ever be as lovely as a tree. The speaker develops this proposition into a reverent meditation on the splendor of the natural world and the miracle of God’s Creation. The speaker’s meditation plays out largely through the four middle stanzas, where the speaker uses personification to describe what it is about trees that makes them so lovely. The poem was first published in a magazine in 1913, then it was reprinted the following year in Kilmer’s second collection of verse, Trees and Other Poems. The poem was an immediate popular success, and it has since appeared in innumerable anthologies and been set to music by various composers. Although some critics both past and present have disparaged the poem’s simplicity and sentimentality, it remains an influential work of enduring importance.

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