Binsey Poplars’ is one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s best-known lyrics. It was written in 1879 , after he revisited the small hamlet of Godstow near Oxford, a few miles north of Binsey. He was pained to find that the aspens that lined the river Thames had fallen.
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
Binsey Poplars is a sorrowful cry for not just nature harmed for the rapid industrialization which was happening at the time, but also for a part of childhood that Hopkins attributed the aspen trees to. He missed his good old days of simplicity and with a special love for those trees.
The poem is divided into two stanzas: the first addresses the felling of the poplar trees themselves, and the second ponders man’s habit of destroying nature in broader terms.
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