The Praise of God in Joyce Kilmer’s Selected Poems

Abstract

This thesis examines how the poet, Joyce Kilmer, praises God and its significance in the selected poems.There are three poems that will be examined, which are Trees, Love’s Lantern, and As Winds That Blow Against A Star, taken from Kilmer’s collection of poems entitled Trees and Other Poems, which was published in 1914. This research aims to uncover Kilmer’s intentions in inserting the praise of God in the selected poems. Therefore, Michael Riffaterre’s Semiotic of Poetry is chosen to examine the selected poems. The selected poems will be examined through four stages of Riffaterre’s Semiotic of Poetry, which are heuristi c, hermeneutic, hypogram, and matrix, model, and variants. Heuristic will discover the literal meaning of the poems, hermeneutic will interpret the poems, which will be supported by hypogram as an additional source to interpret the meaning of the poem at a deeper level, and matrix, model, and variants will discover the construction of the poems. These four stages will discover the significance of the praise of God in the selected poems. This thesis is qualitative research because it concerns the understanding of meaning that attaches to people’s actions, which relates to examine Kilmer’s perspective and beliefs in inserting the praise of God in the selected poems. This research is a textual analysis because the data are presented in the form of words, phrases, and sentences. The result of this research is that Kilmer praises God through the figure of trees in the poem Trees, through the power of faith in God in the poem Love’s Lantern, and through the power of strong faith in God in the poem As Winds That Blow Against A Star. Kilmer combines his religiousity and philosophy in praising God in the selected poems, which combines his Catholicism and Plato’s Theory of Ideas. The significance of the praise of God in the selected poems reveals that Kilmer shares his three stages of faith journey, which start with adoring God, then believing (having faith in God), and receiving a blessing from God. Furthermore, Kilmer’s intentions in inserting the praise of God in the selected poems are in order to offers Catholic faith in God to the reader.