The first two lines of "Binsey Poplars" could almost be the opening of a Romantic ode: a nature-worshiping paean to a particularly beautiful stand of poplars (a kind of tree also known as aspen) growing alongside the River Isis in Oxford.
But this isn't an early-19th-century stroll through the countryside. It's later, "1879," the height of the Victorian era and the Industrial Revolution—and the trees the speaker sings of have been "felled," chopped down. This poem, which tells a true story from Gerard Manley Hopkins's years in Oxford, will be a lament both for these particular trees and for a whole maimed, exploited landscape.
The poem's speaker loved these lost trees deeply: they were "his aspens dear," his familiar friends. These trees, the speaker recalls, gently restrained the sunlight, seeming to capture it in their branches. Listen to the lyrical repetitions he uses here:
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
These repeated sounds evoke the trees' rhythmic movements and the way their leaves held the light:
- The gentle epizeuxis and alliteration of "quelled, / Quelled or quenched" evokes the back-and-forth sway and rustle of trees in a light wind.
- The alliteration and assonance of "quenched in leaves the leaping sun," besides being just plain euphonious, mirror the leaves' action in language: by connecting the "leaves" to the "leaping sun," it suggests the way that leaves in sunlight seem to fill up with sun, soaking up the light at the same time as they shade the ground below.
All the beauty, peace, and pleasure of this scene comes to a sharp and painful ending in the third line:
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Repeating those same words over and over, the speaker sounds as if he's in shock, trying to come to terms with what just can't be true: All of them? All gone? (Readers might even hear an echo of Macbeth here: the speaker's repetitions sound a lot like Macduff's disbelieving grief when he learns that all his children have been murdered.)
A change in the poem's rhythms makes this moment even more shocking. Like much of Hopkins's verse, this poem uses sprung rhythm, a kind of accentual meter in which lines use a certain number of stresses, but no set number or pattern of unstressed syllables. Here's how that meter unfolds in these lines:
- The first line of the poem is deceptive. It might make readers expect the whole poem to be written in neat iambic pentameter—lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, like this: "My as- | pens dear, | whose air- | y cag- | es quelled."
- The second line breaks from that pattern, using trochees (the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm), but still following a regular five-beat pentameter pattern: "Quelled or | quenched in | leaves the | leaping | sun."
- The third line still uses five strong stresses. But now strong stresses are just about all the line has. The gentle pulse of stress and unstress is gone, replaced by five gut punches (or axe-blows): "All felled, felled, are all felled."
- Throughout the poem, Hopkins will use flexible patterns of stresses to capture the agony of this great loss. Keep an eye out for the places his rhythms change.
The speaker feels this tree-cutting like a death. The rest of the poem will be his elegy both for these trees and for the landscape around them—a countryside world that will never be the same again.