‘I THINK that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.’’ Like millions of schoolchildren, “Trees,’’ by Joyce Kilmer, was my first memorized poem. Its brevity, couplet structure, perfect rhyme scheme, swaying rhythm, punchy ending, all topped by moral uplift (“But only God can make a tree.’’) made it, in my time, a universal gateway to poetry. But “Trees’’ was more than that to me.
When I went to high school, two things happened to change the poem’s meaning. First, I discovered that one of my classmates was the poet’s grandson. From him, I learned that Joyce Kilmer was not a woman, and that he had been killed in action during World War I - a fate that gave the poem an added poignancy. In that high school, we boys always referred to one another by our last names, and I never uttered Kilmer’s without a first shudder of delight that comes with drawing near celebrity, even if at the remove of two generations. Kilmer, by virtue of his name, was somebody.
But then, to my embarrassed anguish, I was witness to an act of cruel pedagogy when our freshman English teacher, a pedant-sadist, taught “Trees’’ as an example of bad poetry. It irked him to be confronted every autumn with a new class of mulish pupils who had been instructed in grade school to regard the poem as a masterpiece, and now was his chance to get revenge.
He wrote the poem out on the blackboard. My face burned as red as Kilmer’s when the teacher mocked the blatant meter (de-DAH, da-DAH), the sappy rhymes, and, especially, the denigration of the poetic imagination (“Poems are made by fools like me’’) - all compounded by the fuzzy religiosity of the last line (Uplift? Hah!). The adjective with which the teacher dismissed the poem was “sentimental,’’ a word he wielded like a sword. However it cut my classmate Kilmer, that snarled “sentimental’’ pierced me so deeply that, years later, I carried it into my own vocation as the essence of writerly mortal sin, an offense of which I may be guilty even here.
Am I being sentimental this morning? Holding coffee, I am looking at the tree in our yard. A stalwart pine, it was infected with turpentine beetles and has been slowly dying all summer. Instead of pale-green cones and the candle-shaped shoots of fresh growth, the tree is scorched with brown needles, which keep falling. Its dead pinecones look like gnarled tumors. The nearly naked branches are like a skeleton being skinned one bone at a time. My free association moves from mortal sin to mortality, but I rebuke myself for what our teacher emphatically warned us of - pathetic fallacy, the urge to attribute to the inanimate phenomena of nature emotional significance that belongs only to human beings.
The tree is dying. So what? The tree feels nothing, and if I hang on its scrawny branches ornaments of my own melancholy - well then, no wonder I cling respectfully to the memory of Joyce Kilmer. It must be 100 years ago that he stood transfixed by some particular tree. Whatever is to be made of his poetic talent, the fact is that Kilmer’s tree is almost surely dead, while his poem lives on, if only in the mental backwoods of an uncritical writer.
For all I know, my freshman English teacher is dead by now. If not, and if by the astonishment of the written word (can a word be astonished?) he were to be reading this column, I would just like to say that what I learned that day from you had more to do with cruelty than art. If it is sentimental to regard the feelings of a dead writer’s grandson as worth more than a lesson, to feel grief at the sight of the dying tree in the yard, compounded with guilt for all the years I took it for granted - then I confess. As for Joyce Kilmer, I am frankly pleased to discover that I still carry his sentimental poem in my heart, the words I needed today to speak of a tree that has been beautiful and true, and, even dying, still is.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
