Few poems open by admitting defeat, but Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" does exactly that. "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree": the speaker sets poetry beside a tree and hands the prize to the tree before the contest has begun. The rest of the poem gives the reasons, and the last couplet delivers the verdict: "Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree." The central idea is a contrast between making and creating. Human art is assembled by people who call themselves "fools," while the tree is simply given, and its beauty needs no author's effort.
The poem makes this claim persuasive by turning the tree into a living, bodily figure. The tree has a "hungry mouth" pressed against "the earth's sweet flowing breast," so the ground becomes a nursing mother and the tree a feeding child. A few lines later the same tree is a grown woman who "lifts her leafy arms to pray" and wears "a nest of robins in her hair." The images move in a clear pattern: down into the soil, up toward the sky, then outward into the seasons, where snow "has lain" on her "bosom" and she "intimately lives with rain." The tree is rooted, devout, sheltering and weathered all at once. Notice that the poem never describes leaves, bark or height. It cares about what the tree does and endures, not what it looks like.
The prayer image carries the poem's religious weight. The tree "looks at God all day," and the phrase "all day" matters, because the tree's attention never wanders. Beside that steady devotion, the speaker, who only "thinks" and "shall never see," seems restless and uncertain. The tree prays without words, while the poet needs a dozen lines and still concedes failure.
The syntax adds to this. From line 3 onward the poem is one long run of descriptions hanging from the word "tree": "A tree whose…", "A tree that…", "A tree that…", then "Upon whose…", "Who…". The repeated "A tree" sounds almost like a litany, and the sentence never arrives at a main verb to close it off. This may be only the plain accumulation of a list. But the poem's own logic suggests another reading: the speaker keeps adding praise and never lands on a sentence good enough to do the tree justice.
Against that loose, piled-up grammar, the sound is very orderly. Every line has eight syllables in an iambic beat, and the rhymes run in neat couplets: see/tree, prest/breast, day/pray, wear/hair, lain/rain, me/tree. The effect is close to a nursery rhyme, which suits such plain claims and makes the lines easy to remember. The spelling "prest" looks old-fashioned and gives the poem a slightly antique, prayer-book tone. The rhyme scheme also frames the poem: it begins with "see/tree" and ends with "me/tree," so "tree" opens and closes the poem. In that last rhyme, "me" is bound to "tree" by sound alone, as if the poet may stand beside what he cannot equal. Even the longest word, "intimately," fits the pulse of the line: who IN-ti-MATE-ly LIVES with RAIN. It is also the most abstract word in a poem of concrete nouns, and it makes rain a companion rather than mere weather.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with plain words and regular form. Its simplicity is part of its argument, since a poem that praises natural beauty over human craft would look foolish dressed in showy ornament. There is also a gentle irony in the situation: a poem insisting that no poem equals a tree has to be good enough to be worth making the claim. Readers can test it. Is the comparison fair, given that a poem and a tree are such different things? Does turning the tree into a woman at prayer honour it, or just make it a human figure? Questions like these keep a twelve-line poem alive long after the last rhyme has landed.