“Binsey Poplars” is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), written in 1879. He was born on July 28, 1844 at Stratford, Essex, England. He was an English poet, convert to Catholicism and Jusuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody (particularly his invention of Sprung Rhythm) and use of imagery established him after his death as an innovative writer of verse. Nature and religion were the two major themes in his poetic works.
The poem “Binsey Poplars” was inspired by the felling of a row of poplar trees near the village of Binsey, Northwest of Oxford, England, and overlooking Port Meadow on the bank of River Thames. The replacements for these trees, running from Binsey north to Godstow, lasted until 2004, when replanting began again. The Bodleian Library of Oxford University holds a draft manuscripts of the poem, handwritten by Hopkins, acquired in 2013.
In the stanza, the poet mourns the cutting of his “aspens dear”, trees whose delicate beauty resided not only in their appearance, but in the way they created “Airy Cages” to tame the sunlight. These lovely trees which Hopkins laments have all been “ felled”. He compares them to an army of soldiers obliterated in the form of the following line “Of a fresh and following folded rank.” Hopkins grieves over the wholesale destruction of the natural world which takes place because people failed to realize the implication of their action. To “delve or hew” (dig as in mining or chop down trees) is to treat the earth too harshly, for “country” is something “so tender”, that the least damage can change it irrevocably.
The poet offers as an analogy the pricking of an eyeball, an organ use mechanisms or subtle and powerful, though the tissues are infinitely delicate; to prick it even slightly changes completely from what it was something recognizable(and useless). Indeed even an action that is meant to be beneficial can affect landscape in this way, Hopkins says. The Earth held beauties before our time that “after-comers” will have no idea of, since they are now last forever. It takes so little(only “Ten or Twelve strokes”) to “ unselve” the landscape, or alter it so completely that it is no longer itself.
According to the reader’s view Hopkins had proved to be a Pioneer Feminist before feminist act was brought in by expressing his views about feminism in the following lines “To Mend her We end her.” Instead of saving the nature, humans are killing it. So he symbolically represents the consequences and problems faced in the feminist society. How trees suffered lots of pain similarly women suffered the same types of pain, that is the reason why Hopkins compared nature to women.
This poem is written in “Sprung rhythm” the innovative metric form developed by Hopkins. In sprung rhythm the number of accents in a line are counted, but the number syllables are not. The result, in this poem, is the Hopkins is able to group accented syllables together, creating striking onomatopoeic effects. In the third line, for example, the heavy recurrence of the accented words “all” and “felled” strike the ear like the blows of an axe on the tree trunks.
However in the final three lines the repetition of phrases works differently. Here the technique achieves a more wistful and song-like quality; the chanted phrase “sweet especial rural scene” evokes the numb incomprehension of grief and the unwillingness of a bereaved heart to let go. This poem offers good example of the way Hopkins chooses, alters, and invents words with a view to the sonorousness of his poems. Here, he uses “dandled” (instead of a more familiar wood such as “dangled”) to create a rhyme with “sandalled” and to echo the consonants in the final three lines of the stanza.
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