Trees
Write the patient giants that outlive their poets and keep every year on record.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about trees: bark and branch imagery, time and rootedness, craft techniques, mistakes, exercises and prompts by Writory for every poet.
What this theme is
A tree poem is a poem about time made visible. Trees keep their history in public: the rings, the scars, the branch lost in the storm of a named year, the initials somebody carved and outgrew. They stand in one place for longer than a human life, which is why poets keep using them to measure everything that moves faster, childhoods, marriages, wars, the poet. Writing trees well means resisting the urge to make them wise old souls and instead attending to what they actually are: slow, literal, particular organisms with bark you can touch.
The theme also carries a built-in double perspective. A tree is simultaneously an individual, this oak, this jacaranda, this lightning-struck pine at the school gate, and a member of something larger, an orchard, a forest, a street's memory. The best tree poems choose their scale deliberately and know exactly which tree they mean.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose trees when they need a witness. A tree at the centre of a poem has usually seen more than the speaker: it stood there before the house was built and will stand after the family scatters. That silent seniority gives tree poems their characteristic tone, part gratitude, part rebuke, part envy of anything that knows how to stay.
Trees also reward the craft-minded. Their anatomy maps uncannily onto poetry's concerns, roots and origins, branching choices, seasonal loss and return, so a poet can build an entire structure on the tree's own logic. Poems like this tend to hold together under the kind of scoring Writory's judges apply, where structure and theme are read as partners, not strangers.
Where it comes from
Joyce Kilmer's Trees, from 1913, remains the most famous and the most argued-over tree poem in English, its opening claim that no poem is lovely as a tree quoted by people who have read nothing else. A. E. Housman set the standard for tree-and-time poems with his cherry hung with snow, counting the fifty springs a young man has left to see it. Gerard Manley Hopkins mourned the felling of his Binsey poplars, all felled, and grasped early that landscapes, once unselved, do not come back. Classical and scriptural traditions run deeper still: sacred groves in Greece, the Bodhi tree, Yggdrasil holding up the Norse cosmos.
In the twentieth century poets kept returning, from Frost's birches bent by boys' swinging to Larkin's greening trees that say begin afresh, evidence that the theme regrows for every generation.
The elements that carry it
- Bark up close, its plates, lichen, scars and carved initials, turns the tree from scenery into a surface with a biography.
- Rings and girth give the poem arithmetic: a tree that predates the motorway, the war, the poet's grandmother.
- Seasonal costume changes, bare, budding, full, burning, falling, let one tree carry a whole calendar of feeling.
- The underground half, roots gripping pipes and headstones, reminds the reader that half of every tree is invisible.
- Wind in the crown supplies the tree's only voice, and the difference between rustle, hiss and roar is a tonal instrument.
Techniques that work
- Choose one specific, locatable tree and stay with it. The plane tree outside the hospital window will beat the forest of the mind every time.
- Measure human time against tree time explicitly: what the tree has outlasted, what it will outlast, and where the speaker falls between.
- Use the tree's structure as the poem's structure: a stanza for roots, trunk, crown, or lines that branch through indentation.
- Give the tree a role in a human story, shade for a first kiss, the branch a swing hung from, the stump after the council came, rather than describing it in isolation.
- If the tree must speak or feel, commit fully and make it strange; a half-hearted personification is worse than none.
Mistakes to avoid
- The wise old tree who teaches the speaker patience. Trees are not mentors; the lesson lands harder when the tree remains indifferent.
- Generic tree writing: a tree with no species, no location, no season. Name it, oak, gum, banyan, and half your imagery arrives free.
- Ecological sermon endings about saving the forests. Care for trees is better shown through loving attention than instruction.
- Reaching for Kilmer's rhythm or arguing with his poem. It has been done since 1913; find your own tree and your own quarrel.
An exercise
Stand under, or clearly recall, one particular tree you have known for years. Write three lists: what it has witnessed, what has been done to it, what it does daily without anyone noticing. Build a poem using one item from each list.
A challenge
Write about the same tree in three short sections set decades apart, childhood, the present, and a future in which either the tree or the speaker is gone. Keep every section rooted at the same address.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in which someone must decide whether to cut down a tree their late parent planted, and the argument for and against is conducted entirely through what the tree has meant.
Before you submit
- The tree has a species, a location, or both.
- At least one image comes from touching, not just seeing, the tree.
- The poem uses time in a way only a tree could make possible.
- No lesson is preached; any wisdom is left inside the images.
- The ending stays at the tree instead of floating up into abstraction.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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