Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Binsey Poplars"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889), an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame places him among leading English poets. His prosody – notably his concept of sprung rhythm – established him as an innovator, as did his praise of God through vivid use of imagery and nature. Only after his death did Robert Bridges publish a few of Hopkins's mature poems in anthologies, hoping to prepare for wider acceptance of his style. By 1930 Hopkins's work was seen as one of the most original literary advances of his century. It intrigued such leading 20th-century poets as T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis.

—bia via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, October 11th, 20203. Today's poem is by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it's called Binsey Poplars. I'll read it one time, offer a few comments, and read it again.
0:22.1	Binsey Poplars, Feld 1879.
0:28.8	My Aspens deer, whose airy cages quelled, quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
0:37.2	all felled, felled, are all felled, of a fresh and following
0:42.3	folded rank, not spared, not one that dandled, a sandaled shadow that swam or sank on meadow and
0:49.6	river and wind-wandering, weed-winding bank. If we but knew what we do, when we delve or hue, hack and rack the growing green,
1:00.8	since nature is so tender to touch, her being so slender that, like this sleek and seeing ball,
1:08.0	but a prick will make no eye at all, where we, even where we mean to mend her,
1:13.6	we end her when we hue or delve. Aftercomers cannot guess the beauty bin. Ten or twelve, only ten
1:22.4	or twelve, strokes of havoc unsalve the sweet especial sweet, a special scene, rural scene, a rural scene, sweet a special
1:33.6	rural scene.
1:39.3	Dryden Manley Hopkins spent a good deal of his life in the environs of Oxford.
1:48.9	And Binsey is a small township or suburbs of Oxford proper, where there were a well-known group of poplar trees lining a riverwalk, and one day the town decided
2:06.9	they had to go. There was no logic in this as far as Hopkins was concerned. He was rather
2:13.6	indignant about the loss of the trees, and he wrote this poem to express his
2:18.2	feelings on the matter. Hopkins, who was an Oxford Anglican and then Roman Catholic convert,
2:27.6	has a lot in common with J.R.R. Tolkien, who also grew up in or near Oxford as the ward of a Franciscan friar.
2:38.7	And he too was something of a kindred spirit with Hopkins.
2:43.4	When it comes to trees, fans of the Lord of the Rings will remember his ants and especially tree beards rant against those who come hacking and burning and destroying trees unneedlessly.
3:03.7	Trees that were indeed his friends, I think Tolkien and Hopkins both might have
3:08.2	sometime or another in their lives thought of particular trees as their friends.
3:13.2	Tolkien also remembers in some of his personal letters,
	...

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