Binsey Poplars

Binsey Poplars

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 so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even when 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 unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

It is a pity that the Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman did not consult the collected poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins before she proposed selling off Britain’s forests. Hopkins’s poem was written after he discovered his favourite grove of poplars had been cut down to make brake shoes for the Great Western Railway. It is a poem that generations have learnt at school and it is much anthologised and it perfectly encapsulates the sense of national outrage that greeted the government’s plans to sell off our sylvan heritage. Of course no one could be further from the heart of Middle England than the Jesuit Hopkins, who battled all his life to suppress his feelings for other men; but this poem could be the battle hymn of the woodland loving classes. It is beside the point, of course, that poplars are an extremely fast growing wood and those ‘airy cages’ have risen once again.