Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, May 5th, 2025. Today's poem is by British poet and hymnographer William Cooper, looks like Cowper.

And it's called the Poplar Field.

Even if you don't know this poem, there's a lot in it that may seem familiar,

since it is likely one of the inspirations for it,

a better known poem written a century later,

Binsley Poplars by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

However, where Hopkins remains concerned primarily with the stated subject and then lifts off into a meditation on the active responsibility of mankind to the world

around him, Cooper can't help but turn inward and meditate instead on the futility of life.

Cooper always tended toward a cerebral nature.

In fact, he struggled with madness through much of his life.

G.K. Chesterton once said about him, only one great English poet went mad.

Cooper, and he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination.

Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine. Poetry partly kept him in health.

And maybe that's on display here in this poem. There's

definitely a pull towards a dark night of the soul. Man's life certainly is like a vapor,

but for Cooper, this observation tends to tug him towards a kind of gloomy fatalism.

And within these lines, we see the pull and the struggle in which his art is a laboring

to keep him sane and whole, which is difficult when the world around him and the things

he loves in it are being destroyed.

Here is the poplar field.

The poplars are felled.

Farewell to the shade and the whispering sound of the cool colonnade.

...