The Joyce Kilmer House

17 Joyce Kilmer Ave, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Photo by "Zeete", CC BY-SA 4.0.

Joyce Kilmer's influence on popular culture stemmed not from his wartime service, but from a poem he published several years earlier--- "Trees". Written in iambic four-foot couplets, the simple twelve-line poem's publication coincided with one of the first waves of American interest in the preservation of natural spaces. Kilmer continues to have a popular following, and blogs, discussion boards, and newsletters demonstrate that many Americans continue to reflect on his work. 

Shortly after its publication, the poem's brevity enabled its adoption into the new mediums of recorded music and television: 

"Trees" by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
 
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
 
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
 
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
 
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
 
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

The poem continues to receive new interpretations. 

People around the world, for example, recite the poem while learning English. Teachers exploit it as a mimetic tool for learning vowel sounds.

In a darker vein--and perhaps in the spirit of preserving Kilmer House as a war memorial--Christopher Edwin Steininger and Patronoid Magazine offer a video-graphic interpretation of the poem that contrasts Kilmer's violent death with the romantic innocence of his writing:

An earlier animated interpretation takes a softer approach, and makes an explicit connection between Kilmer's Christian faith and the imagery of the poem. 

By drawing on Christian traditions, the poem exists in the same symbolic space as John Newton's classic hymn, "I saw One hanging on the tree". 

I saw One hanging on a tree,
In agony and blood;
He fixes His loving eyes on me,
As near His cross I stood.

O, can it be, upon a tree
The Savior died for me?
My soul is thrilled,
my heart is filled,
To think He died for me!

John Newton, author of 'Amazing Grace' and other hynms.

The resonances with hymn grant Kilmer's panegyric lines a more visceral reading. Now, a tree that praises God with "her leafy arms" is also a tree upon which Christ can die "In agony and blood". The juxtaposition enables Kilmer's gendered, anthropomorphized tree both to praise Kilmer's God and to serve as the instrument of His death and sacrifice. 

The implicit sacrifice in "Trees" would become explicit in Kilmer's war poetry, all of which follows in the same panegyric style.

Here for example is Joyce Kilmer's "Prayer of a Soldier in France", a poem in which an infantryman suffering through trench warfare mitigates his own discomfort by imagining the suffering of Jesus Christ. 

Portrait of Sergeant Joyce Kilmer in uniform.

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).

I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).

Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).

I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.

(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy agony of Bloody Sweat?)

My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).

Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.

So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.​

The strident effort to memorialize the dead leads to the preservation of such a building as the Joyce Kilmer House. 
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But people have different ways of remembering the dead, especially when they view their loved one's not in a single instance of sacrifice, but in the full complexity of life.  ​

*DRAFT NOTES*

-- Interview with Brian
-- Interview with with George
-- Comparison with other memorials in New Brunswick
-- Poems from Joyce Kilmer's wife
-- Mention Dial-a-Ride, and Kilmer's poetic commentary on the importance of bringing new life to old houses. 

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Grant funding has been provided by the Middlesex County Board of County Commissioners Through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and Arts Trust Fund.

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