As Lovely as a Tree Trivia Quiz

Answer: Joyce Kilmer

Joyce Kilmer (full name Alfred Joyce Kilmer) was born in 1886 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1917 he enlisted with the U.S. army, and served as an intelligence observer. He was killed in action by a sniper at Seringes, France on July 30, 1918, leaving a wife and five children, all under ten years of age. The French government awarded him a posthumous Croix de Guerre for valour. His best known poem, 'Trees' was published in 1914 in a volume of his poetry entitles 'Trees and Other Poems'. In 1922, American composer Oscar Rasbach set the poem to music, and it was first sung by Paul Robeson.

Interesting trivia note: Kilmer's father, Frederick, was a physician and chemist employed by Johnson and Johnson and the inventor of the company's famed Baby Powder.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree:

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

At 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.

Answer: Cherry

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was educated at Oxford, and taught Latin and Greek, first at the University of London and later at Cambridge. Throughout his academic career, he continued to write poetry, much of it pastoral, rooted in his love of his native Worcestershire and other midland counties.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs is little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

You'll find the poem in Housman's collection called 'A Shropshire Lad'.

Answer: Birch

Lowell, in his 1846 poem 'An Indian Summer Reverie' refers to the birch as the "most shy and ladylike of trees". Lowell was born in Cambridge, Massachussetts in 1819 and died there in 1891. Not only was he a leading romantic poet, but his career also spanned the fields of literary criticism and satire, and diplomacy. He was an ardent abolitionist.

Answer: Longfellow

"Under the spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;"

These are the opening lines of Longfellow's 1842 poem 'The Village Blacksmith'. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine in 1807, but spent most of his adult life living in Cambridge, Massachussetts, where he died in 1882. On his father's side he was descended from John and Priscilla Alden, and on his mother's side from General Peleg Wadsworth, a general in the Revolutionary War. Longfellow's home in Cambridge was a brick house once occupied during the Revolutionary War by another general, George Washington by name. Longfellow's best known poems are 'Paul Revere's Ride', 'The Song of Hiawatha' and 'Evangeline'. He was one of the five members of the group known as The Fireside Poets. (The other members were James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes,Sr., and William Cullen Bryant.) They were called The Fireside Poets because of their immense popularity and few middle-class homes in New England did not have their poems on their bookshelves. Longfellow has the distinction of being the first American poet to have a memorial in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Answer: Blasts their roots

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) was an absolute master of imagery, and his love of language and its rhythms permeates all his work. 'The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower' was written in 1934, when Dylan was only 20. It is a powerful poem infused with images of life and death - a theme not uncommon in his poetry. "The Force" is the process of life and death, and in Dylan's understanding they are not separate but united. Dylan Thomas was born in Mumbles, which is near Swansea in South Wales.

He died in New York in 1953 of a brain aneurysm brought on by overindulgence in alcohol. At the time of his death, he was at the height of his powers as a poet and wordsmith. He is buried in near his former home in Laugharne, Wales.

Answer: Alexander Pope

The quotation comes from Pope's 'Summer', one of the Pastorals he wrote in 1704, when he was 20. Pope was the premier poet of the early eighteenth century in England. He is best known for his 'Rape of the Lock'.

Answer: Keats

John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful poems of the English language, and he left a surprisingly large body of work for one who died so young (he was several months short of his 26th birthday when he died of tuberculosis in Rome in February, 1821).

The 'Dryad of the trees" is the nightingale, and the lines quoted are found in Stanza One of Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale'. If you ever visit London, stop off at Moorgate Station and walk the short distance to a pub called 'The John Keats at Moorgate', which is close to Keats' birthplace. Wordsworth wrote about the cuckoo, hardly a bird that "singest of summer with full-throated ease", while Shelley wrote 'To a Skylark'. I cannot recall any bird poems by Byron.

The only birds he seemed to fancy were of the human variety.

Answer: Sonnet 73

It is in Sonnet 73 that Shakespeare describes himself as winter
"That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

There has been much conjecture about the sonnets - to whom were they addressed? Was Shakespeare revealing his bisexuality? Who was the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady? And on, and on, and on. I leave all that stuff to the scholars. I'd rather simply enjoy the beauty of Shakespeare's language, his complete mastery of the turn of phrase, and the love of nature he reveals in all his work. Sonnet 116 is one of my favourites: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment...", while Sonnet 18 is the one in which Shakespeare asks "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date." Sonnet 29, another of my favourites, contains the well-known lines "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings."

Answer: Alfred Noyes

'The Highwayman' is probably Alfred Noyes' best-known poem, and every school child in England had to learn it. I won an elocution contest reciting it when I was ten. Noyes was born in Wolverhampton in the English Midlands in 1880. He published his first collection of poetry in 1901, and thereafter, between 1903 and 1908, he published five more volumes.

He taught English literature at Princeton from 1914 to 1923, then returned to England. Noyes died in 1958 and is buried on the Isle of Wight.

Answer: Edward Lear

In his poem, 'The Owl and the Pussycat', Edward Lear tells us that "they sailed away for a year and a day to the land where the Bong tree grows". Lewis Carroll wrote equally enchanting nonsense verse (the favourite at our house was 'Jabberwocky'), and so does Dennis Lee (ever read 'Alligator Pie'?) John Lennon probably knew a great deal about bongs but I don't recall that he ever wrote a poem mentioning a Bong tree.