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Poems for study » Binsey Poplars » Themes in Binsey Poplars

The poem anticipates also the main theme of Hopkins’ two following poems, Duns Scotus’ Oxford and Henry Purcell: the uniqueness as well as the beauty of nature:

  • ‘unselve’ has a technical meaning: to take away the uniqueness of a scene, to destroy its inscape
  • this is also the meaning of ‘especial’, used similarly in ‘Henry Purcell’ (l.2).

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 só 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 únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

 
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