Quinn pointed you toward those ancient trees down the side road — the Joyce Kilmer forest, four-hundred-year-old giants that somehow escaped the saw. Let me tell you about the man they're named for, because it's a tender story, and it ties a Carolina mountain to a battlefield in France.
Joyce Kilmer was an American poet, a young family man up in New Jersey, and back in nineteen thirteen he wrote a short, simple poem that just about every schoolchild of a certain age once knew by heart. It begins, 'I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.' Twelve plain lines about how no human art could match the living beauty of a tree. It wasn't fancy. It went straight to the heart, and the whole country took it up.
Then came the First World War. Kilmer didn't have to go — he was a married man with children, a working writer. But he enlisted, shipped to France, and in the summer of nineteen eighteen, scouting ahead of his men near a river, a German sniper's bullet found him. He was thirty-one years old. The man who wrote the most famous poem about trees in the English language was laid in the ground of a French forest.
Years later, when folks went looking for the right way to honor him, somebody had the perfect idea. Not a statue. Not a plaque. A forest — a stand of the oldest, grandest, most untouched trees they could find in all the land. And they found them right here, down that road: giants that were already old when Kilmer's great-great-grandparents were born. So the poet who loved trees more than poems rests in memory among the greatest trees left in the East. If you can spare the time on your way through, walk in under them, and think of him. It's the finest memorial I know of — a poem you can stand inside.
Photo: Miscellaneous Items in High Demand, PPOC, Library of Congress · Public domain
