Joyce Kilmer's Trees and the Forest That Outlived Him

Joyce Kilmer was twenty-six years old when he published a twelve-line poem called 'Trees' in the journal Poetry in August of nineteen thirteen. The poem begins: I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. It became one of the most reprinted English-language poems of the twentieth century, appearing in school readers, greeting cards, and anthologies across five decades. Kilmer became famous for it.

He was killed in France on July thirtieth, nineteen eighteen, at the age of thirty-one, during the Second Battle of the Marne. He had enlisted in the United States Army after the United States entered the war in nineteen seventeen. He was a sergeant in the Sixty-Ninth Infantry Regiment, a predominantly Irish American unit out of New York. He was shot by a German sniper during reconnaissance near the town of Seringes-et-Nesles. He had been in France for approximately nine months.

In nineteen thirty-six, the United States Forest Service designated a tract of old-growth forest in what is now the Nantahala National Forest as the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest. The memorial is not a monument. It is a forest. Approximately three thousand eight hundred acres of temperate old-growth timber, including tulip poplars that reach one hundred feet and have been growing for four hundred years or more. Some of the trees have trunks more than six feet in diameter. The understory beneath them is a catalog of temperate rainforest species: trillium, galax, rhododendron, hemlock, all in layers from the forest floor to the canopy.

The choice of a forest as a memorial has an elegance that no stone marker would have matched. The poem was about trees. The poet died before he was old. The forest he is memorialized in contains trees older than the United States, trees that will still be standing a century from now, trees that have nothing to do with any human category of fame or obscurity. The two-mile loop trail passes some of the largest specimens. The parking area is small and the crowds are light.