Analysis of Poem Trees by Joyce Kilmer
Author:
Joyce Kilmer Trees is (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer s most popular poem and was first published in the
Poetry magazine, August 1913. It was later the title poem of a book.
This entertaining, if limited, short poem of six full rhyming couplets in which the first-person speaker praises the tree and then God for making it in the first place, uses personification and ironic contrast to make its point poems will never match trees, the work of God.
Only God can make a tree, something which the speaker could never do. This is why the tree is something of a miracle, to be wondered at. A mere poem comes nowhere near a tree and the poet is a fool despite the poem being the vital link, the vehicle of acknowledgement.