Hopkins' Binsey Poplars: 'O if we but knew what we do...'

More about trees...Below you can read one of my favourite poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is about the brutal felling of a row of poplar trees near the village of Binsey near Oxford.  It was written in 1879, and resonates strongly with us in this time of ecological crisis. 

Hopkins' highly original, even revolutionary, style is in sharp contrast to his retiring life as a Jesuit priest. The striking images and vigorous unconventional rhythms express a love of and feeling for the vitality of nature, and an existential grappling with the questions of life. 

He is celebrated in particular for his 'sprung rhythm', which comes from his interest in anglo-saxon poetic metre, as seen for example in Beowulf. In conventional English poetry, rhythm is often generated by repeating feet (groups of syllables) with the stressed syllable falling in the same place. 'Sprung rhythm' breaks radically from this by repeating feet with the stress always falling on the first syllable. This creates a muscular, insistant rhythm, often through spondees: 'All felled, felled...Of a fresh and following folded rank...'). In Binsey Poplars it expresses the violence done to the trees as they were hacked down, or the trees' erstwhile energy as living, vital things, full of personified movement: 'following folded rank'). 

His sense of the metaphysical dimension to the trees can be seen in other poems. He calls this 'internal design' to things 'inscape', a sort of highly individual 'self', or essence, that each manifestation contains. It is a dynamic force unique to the thing, residing within it and pushing outwards as the natural expression of its being. And it is this which is destroyed in the neologism (Hopkins invented many words), 'Strokes of havoc unselve...', as the axes get to work. 

As the violence subsides the poem concludes on a nostalgic tone harking back to the days when the trees stood proud; and naturally, the poet reverts to more traditional, and here gentle, repetitive rhythm and rhyme.

            Binsey Poplars

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.
 
O if we but knew what we do
            When we delve or hew—
    Hack and rack the growing green!
            Since country is so tender
    To touch, her being so slender,
    That, like this sleek and seeing ball
    But a prick will make no eye at all,
            Where we, even where we mean
            To mend her we end her,
            When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
    Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
            Strokes of havoc unselve
            The sweet especial scene,
            Rural scene, a rural scene,
            Sweet especial rural scene.                                                                           

 

[to quell: to put an end to (to a rebellion, or anger, for example)

to quench: to put out (a fire, a sensation of burning or heat, 'to quench your thirst')

to delve: to dig deeply (to delve into your pockets in search of something; often  used figuratively: 'to delve into the past')

to hew: to cut deeply into (wood, stone)

to hack: to cut away at something with quick rough blows

to rack: to torture, to cause extreme pain or distress (normally used in the passive form, figuratively: 'to be racked with guilt')]