 " Trees " is a lyric poem by American poet Joyce Kilmer . Written in February 1913 , it was first published in Poetry : A Magazine of Verse that August and included in Kilmer 's 1914 collection Trees and Other Poems . The poem , in twelve lines of rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter verse , describes what Kilmer perceives as the inability of art created by humankind to replicate the beauty achieved by nature . 
