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BEHOLD THE CATHOLIC MAN . . .

Joyce Kilmer, Catholic Poet-Patriot
by John Covell

Joyce Kilmer, a Catholic poet most widely renowned for the poem “Trees,” was very popular in the early 1900s. He was author of three books of poetry and editor of Dreams and Images, an anthology of then-modern Catholic poets of England and America.Trees was probably the most printed poem of its time, put to music, and memorized by more school children than any other. But that’s not important. What’s important is that Joyce was more than a poet—he was a Catholic poet . . . and, in fact, more than a Catholic poet—a unabashedly Catholic writer, interviewer, husband, father, speaker and patriot . . . and when it comes right down to it, an uncommonly good man.
Of him it is said by a priest who knew him well:

Few men could afford to speak so sternly in the security of their own manhood as Joyce Kilmer. His strong masculine courage is writ ineffaceably in his brief career as a soldier. But his manhood does not appear, to those who knew him, nearly so distinctly from the courage he displayed in war as from the purity and undeviating goodness of his life in peace as well as in war. He feared sin more than he feared shot and shell. I know this to be true, and all his intimate friends divined it, if they did not know it for a certainty. He was a daily communicant whenever circumstances permitted; and, although there is probably no journalist, poet, or literary man living who worked harder than he, the main business with him was to keep his soul clean and unspotted. This is the highest and most difficult kind of manhood attainable. It was this ideal of manhood which inspired Joyce Kilmer’s life even more than it inspired his poetry.

One of Kilmer’s associates said:

Kilmer was, above everything else a poet, and poetry is sometimes defined as the very truth of life. But the poetic genius of Joyce Kilmer has this about it—that it could touch and glorify the commonplace and everyday things in life—a tree, a deserted house, a lonely road—until they were invested with a hallowed beauty and seemed freighted with an almost sacred significance. There is so much in all our lives, young and old, so much that is commonplace and everyday and seemingly devoid of meaning, that he does a great service indeed to his fellow men, who can brighten the commonplace things in life for us.

     Joyce Kilmer was born in December, 1886, and christened Alfred Joyce Kilmer, but the name Alfred never stuck—except when he was teased about it as a boy. Joyce did stick, especially after his college years, when he started to use it professionally. Joyce’s parents, Fred and Annie Kilmer, were good Episcopalians and raised Joyce deeply in that religion. Joyce therefore had a religious influence much like that of the famous Catholic convert Cardinal John Henry Newman. Joyce almost became what Cardinal Newman had been, an Anglican priest.
     Kilmer converted too, but Kilmer’s conversion was not out of theological study; it was out of faith, and it shows in his poetry and all of his writing. Kilmer said, “The Catholic Faith is such a thing that I’d rather write moderately well about it than magnificently well about anything else. It is more important, more beautiful, more necessary than anything else in life.”
     His conversion happened at one of the most prayerful times in his life. He and his wife Aline had been married about 5 years and had three children. The second one, Rosamond (who went by “Rose”) had been afflicted with infantile paralysis. Even though he wasn’t a Catholic yet, Joyce prayed for Rose daily at a Catholic church on his way to work.
     “Just off Broadway,” Kilmer wrote (after Rose’s affliction claimed her life), “on the way from the Hudson Tube Station to The New York Times Building, there is a church called the Church of the Holy Innocents. Since it is in the heart of the Tenderloin, this name is strangely appropriate—for there surely is need of youth and innocence. Well, every morning for months I stopped on my way to the office and prayed in this church for faith. When faith did come, it came, I think, by way of my little paralyzed daughter. Her lifeless hands led me; I think her tiny feet still know beautiful paths.”
     Later he would write: “Her death was a piercing blow, but beautiful. It happened at the best time. Aline was there and I and our parish priest. Rose was happy but did not want to get well. “I’ll drink it in another house,” she said, when the nurse coaxed her to take some broth. Perhaps she meant the new house which we move to in October. And perhaps not. There was a Mission in our parish-church, just a couple of blocks from the house, and while Rose died the voices of the Sisters singing “O Salutaris Hostia” could be heard in the room. . . . Certainly Rose makes Heaven dearer to us.”
     On November 5, 1913, Joyce and Aline Kilmer surprised their families and closest friends by becoming Catholic. And yet this fact is only a half-truth because, although November 5 was the day he and Aline were officially, ceremoniously, and sacramentally welcomed into the Roman Catholic Church, Joyce confessed, “I like to feel that I have always been Catholic.”
     Only the time of Kilmer’s conversion was accidental; his conversion itself was inevitable. Kilmer and his wife became Catholic because it was the thing that made their spiritual “comfort level “ perfect; it completed their sense of belonging to the right Faith. “My wife and I are very comfortable now that we are Catholics,” he wrote. “I think we rather disappointed Father Cronin (the Paulist who received us) by not showing any emotion during the ceremony. But our chief sensation is merely comfortčwe feel we’re where we belong, and it’s a very pleasant feeling.”
     When pressed later about what brought him to conversion, he said, “I believed in the Catholic position, the Catholic view of ethics and aesthetics, for a long time. But I wanted something not intellectual, some conviction not mental—in fact I wanted Faith.” According to his biographer, Joyce was never really himself before he became a convert. “Then his fluid spirituality, his yearning sense of religion, was stabilized.”
     Kilmer knew he was Catholic because he possessed Catholic truth inwardly. It was alive in his mind and he knew that it was a gift lent to him by God, to be used all the while he had life. That stewardship was not a sterile acceptance within his soul—as it is in some Catholics—but an enriching commitment that was a part of his being and a part of everything he did and was to do. Once he was a Catholic, according his biographer, “There was never any possibility of mistaking his point of view: in all matters of religion, art, economics and politics, as well as in all matters of faith and morals, his point of view was obviously and unhesitatingly Catholic.”
     He showed his defense of Catholicism in words and actions. Joyce took it very seriously, as when he was quick to defend our priests. Here’s an example cited by his first biographer:

A somewhat antagonistic non-Catholic once remarked to Kilmer that the Catholic priesthood in this country was, to a rather large extent, recruited from the sons of Irish policemen and scrub-women, to the detriment of the ecclesiastical state. Kilmer flushed an angry red, and rebuked the person in great indignation, saying: “I do not for an instant admit that you are right. And even if you were right—which you most certainly are not—then I should consider it to be the greatest glory of the Catholic Church in this country that its clergy are (as you falsely state) largely recruited from the sons of Irish policemen and scrub-women; and I should have the greatest pride and happiness in telling you or any one else that I feel it the highest privilege to receive the Sacrament of the Catholic Church at the hands of such priests.”

When it came to anti-Catholicism, Kilmer wouldn’t keep silent. This is amply evidenced in Kilmer’s letter to his Jesuit friend, Father James Daly:

Dear Father Daly,
     Soon you may hear that I have been arrested—charged with malicious mischief, larceny and assault and battery.
     On lower Fifth Avenue, near Nineteenth Street, is the Presbyterian Building. The eighth floor is occupied by the Board of Foreign Missions. There are numerous executive offices and two reading rooms.
     In one of the reading rooms is a small collection of idols, most of which came from Africa and China. A shelf prominently placed, holds six or seven ugly green images, a little model of a Confucian temple. . . and a large crucifix. The crucifix is of iron and the figure is painted in natural colors.
     “These idols,” the curator explains, “were given up by people our missionaries converted. That cross belonged to a Mexican family that used to be Roman Catholics.”
     This is bad enough—but here is something worse. The corridor—open to the public—contains large cabinets filled with idols from all over the world. In one of them, among other curious idols, is a large black wooden figure, the image of some African god. It is hideously ugly and furthermore it is obscene—being obviously the relic of some cult of phallic worshipers. In the same cabinet, directly above this lewd thing, is an image of Our Lady.
     Of course, this outrage must stop. I am going to work quietly at first, getting some influential man or organization to send a letter of protest to the Board of Presbyterian Missions. Then, if necessary, I will publish the correspondence in the Times—I can easily get it printed if the letters are strong enough, and both sides are fairly represented. But if I get no results this way, I’ll break the cabinet and steal the image of the Blessed Virgin. I can pass it to a friend of mine who’ll be a block away before the attendants are through with me.
     I think your clerical dignity would desert you if you saw that cabinet—you’d feel like smashing it and smashing a few Presbyterians too.

For Joyce, however, the public affirmation of his Catholicism did not necessitate sack cloth and ashes - nor, in his mind, should it. “A convert to Catholicism,” he wrote concerning Lionel Johnson, another poet and Catholic convert, “is not a person who wanders about weeping over autumn winds and dead leaves, mumbling Latin and sniffing incense.” What Kilmer said about Lionel Johnson could be just as easily said of Kilmer himself: “Religion was for him an essential complement of life. It enters his poems as it enters his thoughts, simply and naturally.”
For Kilmer the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was the solidifying concept that made the Church universal and made his conversion complete, as he expressed it in the following poem.

     Citizen of the World
No longer of Him be it said,
     “He hath no place to lay His head.”
In every land a constant lamp
     Flames by his small and mighty camp.
There is no strange and distant place
     That is not gladdened by His face.
And every nation kneels to hail
     The Splendour shining through its veil.
Cloistered beside the shouting street,
     Silent, He calls me to His feet.
Imprisoned for His love of me,
     He makes my spirit greatly free.
And through my lips that uttered sin
     The King of Glory enters in.

The flame of the tabernacle lamp was a sign for Kilmer as it is a sign for the Catholic Church that the presence of our Lord in the Eucharist is something no Catholic can be far from without falling into darkness. Obviously, that thought is not simple. Nor is the profound thought Kilmer offered on separation from Christ which he delivers in his poem, Multiplication. In that poem he makes a comparison seldom put in words more deeply felt than in his own soul: that separation from the Son of God is the ultimate “hell.”
As for the sacrament of Penance, Kilmer wanted his “penance” to discipline him, as he noted in another letter to Father Daly:

I need some stricter discipline, I think, and it’s hard to get it. I enjoy Father Cullem’s direction very much; he is a fine old Irishman with no nonsense about him. But I need to be called a fool, I need to have some of the conceit and sophistication knocked out of me. I suppose you think this is “enthusiasm” —that much heralded danger of converts. Perhaps it is, but I don’t think so. I know I am glad I live two miles from the church, because it’s excellent for a lazy person like myself to be made to exert himself for religion. And I wish I had a stern medieval confessor—the sort of person one reads about in anti-Catholic books—who would inflict real penances. The saying of Hail Marys and Our Fathers is no penance, it’s a delight.

     On his Catholicity, Kilmer did not talk much about religion so much as he felt it personally, according to his secretary. But his secretary noted that he and Kilmer did have discussions on religious matters: “Indeed these were many and interesting, and he was constantly surprising others by his minute knowledge of pious customs and practices of which a life-long Catholic might easily be ignorant. It was only with respect to religion as particularized in himself that he kept silent.”
     As much as Joyce Kilmer was passionate about being Catholic, he was also passionate about poetry. “All that poetry can be expected to do,” he wrote, ‘’is give pleasure of a noble sort to its readers, leading them to the contemplation of that Beauty which neither words nor sculptures nor pigments can do more than faintly reflect.”
     If beauty and truth lay in any human being, for Joyce that person was Aline. She transformed him, and much of his poetry was devoted to her. Aline Kilmer was a poet in her own right; but she was first and foremost a mother. She would have had eight children if fate had allowed; she even had them named as found in her poem Ambition.

Kenton and Deborah, Michael and Rose,
     These are fine children as all the world knows;
But into my arms in my dreams every night
     Come Peter and Christopher, Faith and Delight.

Kenton is tropical, Rose is pure white,
     Deborah shines like a star in the night;
Michael’s round eyes are as blue as the sea,
     And nothing on earth could be dearer to me.

But where is the baby with Faith can compare?
     What is the colour of Peterkin’s hair?
Who can make Christopher clear to my sight,
     Or show me the eyes of my daughter Delight?

When people inquire I always just state:
     “I have four nice children and hope to have eight.
Though the first four are pretty and certain to please,
     Who knows but the rest may be nicer than these?

The Kilmers had many of the problems every young marriage has: debts, a work schedule for Joyce that left little time for quality time, and the added trouble of Rose’s long illness. Joyce realized that Aline was sometimes overworked and “stressed out.” But he saw her strength and gave her due credit in As Winds That Blow Against a Star.

     Now by what whim of wanton chance
Do radiant eyes know sombre days
     And feet that shod in light should dance
Walk weary and laborious ways?

     But rays from Heaven, white and whole,
May penetrate the gloom of earth;
     And tears but nourish in your soul,
The glory of celestial mirth.

   The darts of toil and sorrow, sent
Against your peaceful beauty, are
   As foolish and as impotent
As winds that blow against a star.

     During the years leading up to America’s entry into the First World War, Joyce was a feature writer for the New York Times. Every week, when he wasn’t lecturing in places like Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, he would interview some notable person in literature or theater in New York and write a full page article for the Sunday Times. When the Germans sank the passenger liner Lusitania, Americans were outraged. To sink a passenger ship with innocent women and children aboard, according to Kilmer, was an ignominious act of cowardice. When his editor asked Kilmer to put this horrible act into verse, he did it with a poem entitled The White Ships and the Red. This poem was, for many Americans, a call to arms. Such an atrocity left unanswered was dishonorable, a dereliction of duty. This was the way Kilmer looked at it. Even though he was 30 years old with four children and easily exempt from the draft, he volunteered to fight tyranny on principle.
     Kilmer had recently interviewed a British artillery officer who was in Canada and the United States garnering support from Americans. (England, of course, had already been at war with Germany for three years.) The officer put it this way: “I found that all my worldly cares had suddenly ceased to matter to anybody, least of all myself—I was not important as an individual, but as a part of a group. This losing of the exaggerated sense of individuality which is characteristic of modern society makes military life very much like what I suppose monastic life used to be. . . . This war is teaching us that it is not the petty affairs of the individual that matter, but the great religious welfare of the race.”
     So Kilmer enlisted, and explained his own enlistment this way: “I feel the pain of my sacrifice is hard on both of us (me and Aline), but I realize also that God wills me to do my duty in this manner; and, therefore, I have every reason to believe that He will take better care of my wife and children than I should ever hope to do. I have considered this step I am taking from every side and I feel there is no doubt that I have an obligation to join the colors. I would be ashamed later on to look at the children if I don’t volunteer. However other married men feel about going, I consider my enlisting as a duty I owe to God and country.” Kilmer worked his way into a military unit—the Fighting Sixty-Ninth—that he knew would be one of the first to see action in France.
     Joyce’s faith and his love for his family were perhaps the only things that were not fleeting in the war. Mail was fleeting—sometimes none for three weeks; tranquility was fleeting—advances to the front lines took care of that; even Holy Communion was fleeting—one chaplain (later two) had to serve the entire regiment, with companies sometimes separated by No Man’s Land, which neither medic nor chaplain dared cross.
     In one instance of absence from the Sacrament of Eucharist, Joyce did the next best thing: he prayed. In church one night he met an old woman so crippled with rheumatism she could not kneel, so she huddled on a bench near the altar. She was pious and prayed aloud. When Joyce showed his beads as he began to pray the Rosary, the painfully lame woman grabbed her cane and, with difficulty, approached the American soldier. She gestured to Joyce that her rosary was broken. Joyce had no tool with him to fix her beads, so he traded his rosary for hers. “She was very grateful,” Joyce wrote, “but I feel I got the best of the bargain, for there may be a special sort of blessing attached to beads worn [smooth] by the gnarled fingers of one so near to God.”
     He wrote just a few poems from France. One, in the rhyme and meter of Trees, was a prayer, Prayer of a Soldier in France:

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).
Men shout at me who may not speak
     (They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).
I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.
     (Then shall my fickle soul forget
The Agony of Bloody Sweat?)
    My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).
    Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.
     So let me render back again
     This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.

Kilmer died on the battlefield in France; and he is buried there because, as he wrote so eloquently in his poem Rouge Bouquet,

There is on earth no worthier grave
To hold the bodies of the brave
Than this place of pain and pride
Where they nobly fought and nobly died.

It is almost haunting to read the words of another poem Kilmer wrote about soldiers who fight for freedom—because it would be so short a time before he himself paid the ultimate price:

The Peacemaker
Upon his will he binds a radiant chain,
For Freedom’s sake he is no longer free.
It is his task, the slave of Liberty,
With his own blood to wipe away a stain.
That pain may cease, he yields his flesh to pain.
To banish war, he must a warrior be.
He dwells in Night, eternal dawn to see,
And gladly dies, abundant life to gain.
What matters Death, if Freedom be not dead?
No flags are fair, if Freedom’s flag be furled.
Who fights for Freedom goes with joyful tread
To meet the fires of Hell against him hurled,
And has for captain Him whose thorn-wreathed head
Smiles from the Cross upon a conquered world.

The effect of his loss on American literature will never be known, but the effect on the men who knew him was profound. In the words of Sergeant Alexander Woolcott, from a letter printed in The New York Times:

The news of Kilmer’s death greeted me on every turn. The captain under whom he had been serving for several months, the major at whose side he fell, stray cooks, doughboys, runners—all shook their heads sorrowfully and talked among themselves of what a good soldier he had been and what an infinite pity it was that the bullet had to single him out. And in such days as these, there are no platitudes of polite regret when men, good men and close pals, are falling about you by the hundreds, when every man in the regiment has come out of the fight the poorer for the loss of not one but many friends, there is no time to say pretty things about a man just because he exists no longer. Death is too common to distinguish anyone. So the glowing praise and admiration I heard for Joyce was real—every word of it.

John Covell is an engineering technician and freelance writer in Brunswick, GA. His special interest in the Catholic poet Joyce Kilmer led him to research at Rutgers, Georgetown, and Marquette universities. For ordering his book or further info on Kilmer, he may be contacted online jacovell@adelphia.net.

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