2012-11-05
Explanation
This comic presents a riff on the famous poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer, which begins with the well-known line "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree." In the comic, the poem is rewritten on a piece of paper in a handwriting style: "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree. / Except for this one's sweet refrains; / Let's print them on a tree's remains." The altered version turns the original poem's reverence for nature into a darkly ironic statement -- the poet acknowledges the beauty of trees, but then cheerfully suggests printing this very poem on paper (which is made from dead trees), essentially celebrating the destruction of the thing being praised.
The caption below reads: "Joyce Kilmer wrote really good cover letters." This adds another layer to the joke, reframing the poem not as sincere art but as a self-promotional pitch -- as if Kilmer were selling a publisher on the commercial viability of printing his tree-praising poems on tree-derived paper, making the whole thing a brilliantly cynical sales pitch.
The votey panel offers "10 Internet points to anyone who argues the following in a lit theory class" and then provides a mock literary analysis claiming the poem expresses Kilmer's deep sense of inadequacy and desire to destroy perfect beauty so it can be replaced by imperfect but controllable beauty. This parodies the overreaching interpretive tendencies of literary criticism, where any text can be twisted to support almost any psychological reading.