“Magnificence unearthed! Read all about it!”
It is 1918. A book has just been published by a new poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. We rush to buy one, and…a basketful of breath-taking poems burst into being! Then we learn. Not only did this new poet die at forty-five; he has been dead for thirty years!
British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) did not live to see any of his work published. His entire life fell within the Victorian era when poets wrote within traditional forms, and he did not fit the mold. His upbringing had shaped him otherwise. He was the eldest of seven children in a family—an entire extended family—that delighted in reading, writing, music and the visual arts. He grew up with word play and punning; he became a musician, sketch artist and painter; and all of it enhanced his poetry.
Industrialization was exploding everywhere in London in the 1800s, but Hopkins did not write about it.[1] He saw urban growth as an invasion. To escape it he spent many hours observing and sketching nature—he even climbed trees to experience them more fully. To him, trees and birds represented the openness of nature and rural life. Just by existing, they were religious expression.
During the 1870s, Hopkins returned briefly to his more rural student home of Oxford. There, “he and his friends were accustomed to taking frequent walks out along the river Thames towards the small town of Binsey. That walk offered beautiful views of the city across Port Meadow, and it was delightfully tree-shaded by a long line of poplars.”[2] Poplar tree leaves are round and light-colored underneath and in a breeze they rustle, and flash silver, and flicker in the sunlight. Poplars regenerate by sprouting new trees from their lateral roots, so it is possible that the whole line of Binsey poplars was one individual tree.
Some poplars are called aspen trees. In ancient Britain, aspen wood was believed to have heroic mythical powers. Celtic people used to put aspen crowns in burial mounds, perhaps thinking it would bring the deceased person’s spirit back to be reborn. Celtic warriors’ shields were also made of aspen; even today people call them “shield trees” and plant them nearby for protection. Hopkins may not have subscribed to these mystical beliefs—he converted to Catholicism and even became a Jesuit priest in the 1860s—but he would have known that in the minds of his readers these traditions lent respect to the subject of his poem.
In March, 1879 the magical, shady grove of poplars Hopkins loved so much along the Binsey road was felled. He saw this as an emotional and religious affront.
Common Poetic Devices
Hopkins impresses us with how beautiful the poplars were, and what violent harm we commit when we repeatedly destroy trees. We could paraphrase what he says something like this:
My beloved aspens, whose open branches put out fire from the leaping sun with leaves, are all fallen! Of the whole healthy group not one of them that lovingly lowered a shadow to swim or sink on meadow or river or riverbank, was spared.
If only we knew what we do when we root out, cut down, and violently slash growing plants! Since wildlife is so sensitive to the touch—it is so fragile that, like this sleek eye I see with only a prick would destroy it—even when we only mean to mend her, we end her when we destroy wildlife. After-comers will never know how beautiful these aspens were. It only took ten or twelve—only ten or twelve strokes—to destroy the identity of this sweet, special place, this rural place, this rural place, this sweet, special rural place.
Paraphrases are useful, but they are nothing compared to the poem itself. By using alliteration of f’s and w’s, long words with many unstressed syllables so they move quickly, and end rhyme, Hopkins shows us how the trees danced.
Of a fresh and following folded rank,
or
wind-wandering weed-winding bank
Yet taken as a whole, the poem grieves. As readers, we mourn not just for one grove but for whole forests. “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been” calls to mind our own favorites that are gone. For centuries and throughout Hopkins’ life, Great Britain scoured the world for timber to support its shipbuilding industry. Liverpool and Bristol were the cities that kept both the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Royal Navy going. Construction of a single battleship required the use of thousands of mature trees taken from Britain’s colonies and other countries.
Now that West African forests are again being exported for other countries’ timber needs, the poem still speaks to us. In lines 20 and 21 to begin the closing, Hopkins uses assonance of low and back vowels, combined with alliteration of v’s and lv’s, purposefully to slow our reading down to a dirge-like pace.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
He adds repetition in the three lines that follow, making the syllables of these simple words fall on our ears like strokes of an axe.
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
Another device Hopkins uses unexpectedly throughout the poem is internal rhyme:
to mend her we end her (note these words also rhyme with his end rhymes tender/slender).
Hopkins did not follow a pattern of end rhymes throughout a poem as did his contemporaries; instead his use of poetic devices was guided by content.
Rhythm
Traditional poetry in English requires a poet to adhere both to patterns of end rhyme, and patterns of metered rhythm. Rhythm is metered, or measured, in units of stressed and unstressed syllables. The most common unit is an iamb, which consists of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable (u /) such as we hear in the words unless or maintain.
A poetic line comprising five iambs in a row, such as the first line in “Binsey Poplars,” has the metrical pattern iambic pentameter, penta- meaning five. (The stressed syllables are in bold).
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled
u / u / u / u / u /
In Hopkins’ time, readers would expect the poem to continue in iambic pentameter after this introductory line, but Hopkins was different. He is best known today for his experimentation with rhythm. His poems spoke like his content. He would mix iambs with trochees (/ u), anapests (u u /) or dactyls (/ u u) or even have several accented syllables knock together in no metrical unit anyone had heard of. He called it “sprung rhythm.”
Hopkins also used a unique system of line indentation that made his sprung rhythm seem to leap off the page. In “Binsey Poplars,” the first line is not indented at all. We take this to mean that a line of five accents/stressed syllables will be the norm. Lines 5 and 6 with two stressed syllables each are the furthest indented. The fewer the stressed syllables, the greater the indentation. Sometimes this method of indenting causes stressed syllables on adjacent lines to align vertically, like notes in chords on a musical staff; sometimes it makes it appear as if more than one voice is speaking.
Hopkins alternated sprung-rhythm lines with traditional metrical lines; a term for combining different forms in this way is “counterpoint.” We see counterpoint in the first three lines. The second line in the poem is nearly iambic pentameter except the first word is a long, accented syllable—quelled—that both describes how the lovely aspens gave shade, and describes what horror has been done to the aspens. Through internal rhyme, quelled points us to the tragic next line. Line 3 is also not indented so we know it should have five accents, but there are only six syllables in the whole line so we have to read it very forcefully. Again, the stressed syllables are knocked together for a reason.
Word Choice
Hopkins loved words and playing with words. His are very precise and he was famous for his coinages—new words he created. There are words in “Binsey Poplars” that normally do not exist in English. What do you think is the meaning of wind-wandering? Unselve?
Other words he uses sound odd to our ears because he coined meanings, or because English has changed in the nearly 1½ centuries since Hopkins wrote.
- Quell is one word that is used differently from how we use it today. It is usually used to mean suppression of a rebellion or of a feeling you want to discourage in someone, such as rudeness or outspokenness. How does its meaning in the poem differ?
- Another is delve, which we use to refer to rummaging in a pocket or a handbag or one’s memory, but then it meant to excavate, which would have been much more fatal to a tree.
- Rack as a verb is used nowadays only with an abstract subject such as pain or disease or doubt/guilt, such as “pain racked his body.” In the poem rack is a violence done by us against such a fragile thing as a tree.
Hopkins used special names for things. Before writing, he would concentrate on his topic so intensely that he could finally perceive an inner framework or essence, or “inscape” as he called it, that made each individual fish/flower/bird/river unique. He would then call the thing by its inscape. Perhaps the airy cages in stanza 1 were the poplar trees’ inscapes, or the folded rank referred to the trees’ one lateral root from which they all grew.
Gerard Manley Hopkins died in Ireland at the age of 45 of typhoid, without ever having had his poems published. We have his friend Robert Bridges to thank for collecting all the poems Hopkins had sent to him, and others, into a book which he edited and published in 1918.
© 2021 Jacqueline Leigh
[1] Hopkins’ father owned a maritime insurance firm, so risks at sea and shipwrecks were often discussed at home. Much of Britain’s industrialization was built on free labor obtained either through slavery or colonialism—two topics Hopkins also never wrote about. Although the Act of 1807 had banned all British trading of enslaved people, European ships trading in the enslaved usually got their “cargo” insured in London through private firms like Hopkins’ through the 1870s.
[2] Study Guide at Gerard Manley Hopkins Official Website, https://hopkinspoetry.com/study-guides/individual-poems/study-guide-binsey-poplars-1879/
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