Poems for study » Binsey Poplars » Imagery and symbolism in Binsey Poplars
The aspect of the trees’ beauty that particularly fascinates Hopkins is the interplay of light and shadow in breeze and sun. The branches are like ‘airy cages’ trapping the sunbeams in their leaves, thus causing dappled shadows, ‘sandalled / Shadow’. He also notes the fineness and delicacy of the trees’ features: strength and delicacy combined. But, in stanza two, this points to the fragility of the trees. Like the human eye, where even a pinprick can blind us, so here: ‘ten or twelve’ axe-strokes destroy the trees for ever. ‘Only ten or twelve’ he repeats forlornly: so long to grow, so delicate, and yet so abruptly and quickly to be chopped down. Fortunately, trees do grow again, and there are some poplars still to be seen at Binsey, hopefully under preservation orders.
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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