George Pope Morris (1802–1864) had his prints all over the first half of the 19th century. A founder and editor of the New York Evening Mirror (rival of The New York Sun), he and his business partner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, also founded a magazine called the Home Journal, still in print today as Town and Country. Along the way, he published the first authorized appearance of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”

He also wrote some verses himself, the most popular (and remunerative) of which were songs, sold in printed pages with simple piano accompaniments for the middle class (who were developing basic piano-playing as a class marker, especially for their daughters). And the most successful of those was the 1837 “Woodman, Spare that Tree!” Recorded performances can still be found, but Morris’s song is almost as faded as, say, James Whitcomb Riley’s 1888 poem The Raggedy Man — fallen away, along with all the rest of the enormously popular sentimental verse that once made regular appearances at school recitals, town halls, and after-church gatherings. “Woodman, Spare that Tree!” is sometimes promoted as the first environmentalist composition, but its message is not the 20th century’s anxious worries about preserving the earth but the 19th century’s nostalgic worries about preserving memory.

Woodman, Spare That Tree!
by George Pope Morris

Woodman, spare that tree!
  Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
  And I’ll protect it now.
’T was my forefather’s hand
  That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
  Thy axe shall harm it not.
 
That old familiar tree,
  Whose glory and renown
Are spread o’er land and sea —
  And wouldst thou hew it down?
Woodman, forbear thy stroke!
  Cut not its earth-bound ties;
Oh, spare that aged oak
  Now towering to the skies!
 
When but an idle boy,
  I sought its grateful shade;
In all their gushing joy
  Here, too, my sisters played.
My mother kissed me here;
  My father pressed my hand —
Forgive this foolish tear,
  But let that old oak stand.
 
My heart-strings round thee cling,
  Close as thy bark, old friend!
Here shall the wild-bird sing,
  And still thy branches bend.
Old tree! the storm still brave!
  And, woodman, leave the spot;
While I’ve a hand to save,
  Thy axe shall harm it not.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.