“Binsey Poplars”: Elegy and Echo

Elegy is a poetic form to which Hopkins continually returns. In one of his most popular poems about death, “Spring and Fall,” Hopkins’s speaker uses the occasion of “Goldengrove unleaving” to teach a kid about her personal mortality (two). In an earlier poem, “Binsey Poplars,” Hopkins also writes about trees to reflect on the nature of loss. This poem attributes a tension among humans and the organic planet: it mourns humanity’s destructive influence on nature in its description of a group of trees that have been “all felled” (3). Indeed, the poem’s major concentrate is to recover the lost sense of inscape surrounding the trees’ destruction. In order to rectify the violence of mankind toward the all-natural world and thereby reconcile the poem’s conflict, Hopkins writes “Binsey Poplars” as an elegy that seeks to reconstruct an echo of the trees each in his memory and in the poem.

The concept of inscape permeates “Binsey Poplars,” as properly as a quantity of Hopkins’s other poems. Catherine Philips defines inscape both as “the characteristic shape of a issue or species,” and, “more importantly,” as “the vital functions that form or communicate the inner character, essence, or ‘personality’ of something” (“Introduction” xx). In addition, Paul Mariani defines inscape as “the underlying energy force and deep form holding things like trees and bluebells and concertos and paintings together” (19). Both definitions concentrate on an object’s inner nature as reflected in its visible, outer type and identity. One more idea relating to the idea of inscape may be identified in the writing of Duns Scotus, from whom Hopkins drew the idea of haeceittas: “thisness, individuation—that which tends to make this oak tree this oak tree only…something special and separate” (Mariani 110). The notion that, for Scotus, individuation applies only to living things is especially relevant in examining an elegy like “Binsey Poplars.” In his journals, Hopkins especially remarks on the lost sense of inscape or ‘thisness’ that he feels in connection with the felled trees of the poem: upon seeing a tree becoming reduce down, he writes, “I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the globe destroyed any more” (“Notes” 359).

The stanza divisions in “Binsey Poplars” reflect the tension that arises out of this loss of inscape. The poem progresses from recreating the trees’ outer traits through imagery in the first stanza to focusing practically exclusively on Hopkins’s critique of humanity in the second. The very first stanza presents distinct aspects of nature as in tandem with each other: the “leaves” interact with the “leaping sun,” although the trees’ “shadows” interact with the “river” (two, 7, 8). Furthermore, the phrase “Meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank,” by means of its amalgamation of a number of various components of nature (such as wind and weeds) to describe the riverbank, definitely represents nature as a unified force (8). Additionally, the scene is peaceful and nearly Edenic. With the beginning of the second stanza, which introduces the human presence in the poem with the pronoun “we,” the much more distinct representations of nature that are present in stanza a single disappear rather, nature is presented vaguely as the “country” and the “growing green” (12, 11).

The implied outcome of this division, according the Hopkins, is that humanity is ignorant of the “havoc” it wreaks on nature (21). This is most evident at the beginning of the second stanza in the line “O if we but knew what we do” (9). Later in the stanza, he similarly states that “after-comers can not guess” at the trees’ inscapes, which areas a concentrate on humanity’s restricted understanding of the significance and beauty of each and every fallen tree (19). Furthermore, these two statements are the shortest cost-free-standing sentences in the poem, making them stand out for their directness and simplicity this maybe indicates that, ironically, the only concepts that the poet represents and grasps clearly are his personal human shortcomings. The simile in the second stanza, as nicely, points to human ignorance or misunderstanding in its implications of blindness: “like this sleek and seeing ball / But a prick will make no eye at all” (14-five). Simply because he groups himself with the rest of humanity with the word “we” in line 9, Hopkins should as a result contend with the issues linked with successfully reimagining the poplars’ uniqueness in writing his elegy.

It is via his private, elegiac concern for the lost inscapes of nature that Hopkins successfully reconciles the tension of the poem’s subject matter. His connection with the trees, exemplified in the way he refers to them in the initial line as “my aspens” and as “dear” to him, supplies an alternative, optimistic representation of the partnership between humanity and nature. Hopkins also personifies the trees throughout the first stanza, additional bridging the gap amongst mankind and the organic. He describes the “shadow [of a tree] that swam or sank / On meadow and river,” which suggests that the shadows are playfully and purposefully interacting with the landscape as folks would (7-8). The use of the word “dandled,” as nicely, refers each to the movement of the branches and the act of “bouncing a child up and down” on one’s knee, injecting a definite human element into the natural scene (6, “Notes” 359). The internal rhyme in this line, “sandalled,” also maybe vaguely connotes that the trees or shadows may possibly somehow seem to be wearing sandals (6). The simile of the second stanza, as well, suggests the delicacy of nature and brings humanity and the organic collectively by way of the evocation of a human eyeball.

By way of these elegiac lines, Hopkins attempts to undo the harm that humanity has done to the trees’ inscapes by temporarily capturing the inner uniqueness of the felled poplars. At the starting of the poem, Hopkins utilizes repetition to show that every now-“unselved” tree when had a distinctive inscape in life (21). He writes that the trees are “All felled, felled, are all felled” (three) in repeating and metrically stressing the word “felled” 3 times, the poem reenacts the person fall of each and every tree and indicates their haeciettas. This continual repetition, exemplified in the poem’s last four lines describing the “sweet especial rural scene,” also creates an echoing effect and suggests that, though the trees’ physical types are gone, their inscapes nonetheless reverberate in Hopkins’s memory (24).

According to Philips’s understanding, inscape is always “the result of mental analysis and perception” and can be regarded “an artist’s analysis” (“Introduction” xx) as a outcome, viewing, analyzing, and writing about the trees allows Hopkins to better comprehend and make sense of their inscapes in his mind. Indeed, a number of puns in the second stanza show Hopkins to be conscious that the act of writing his elegy is a way to assuage his grief. The most noticeable of these puns is on the word “stroke” in the phrase, “ten or twelve / Strokes of havoc” (20-1). Although “stroke” right here refers, on the literal level, to strokes from an axe, the word may well also refer to the “movement of a pen” (OED). The phrase “hew or delve” includes a comparable secondary meaning the word “delve” signifies not only to dig but metaphorically to “make laborious search for facts” (OED). Ultimately, the verb “hack,” up until 1884, meant “to stammer,” which maybe accurately describes another effect of the poem’s repeating lines (OED). The presence of these puns, two of which signify a sort of “laborious” struggle or difficulty with the writing process, allude to the restricted capability of any poet to completely reanimate a lost individual or object in an elegy.

One particular cause why the elegy will only ever have restricted accomplishment in completely evoking the lost trees’ inscapes is the nature of inscape itself: Mariani characterizes inscape as “evanescent” and claims that “one can catch it, [but] only for an instant” (12). Hopkins alludes to the impossibility of fully remembering the lost trees’ uniqueness by means of the poem with the line “after-comers can not guess the beauty been” (19). The “after-comer” that this line references might be any reader of “Binsey Poplars” the purpose that the reader “cannot guess” at the trees’ inscapes is since he or she has only skilled suggestions of them via the filter of the poem, rather than personally observing and “analyzing” them.

“Binsey Poplars,” like a lot of elegies, succeeds in reminding the reader of the “transience of the issues of this world” and the delicacy of their inscapes (Mikics 100). By reconciling humanity and nature via his personal deep grief, Hopkins effectively resolves the tension introduced in the destruction of the trees. Due to the fleeting nature of inscape itself, nonetheless, each and every tree’s uniqueness ultimately seems irrevocably lost. Certainly, reading this elegy against Hopkins’s concept of inscape reveals that the only location in which the poplars nevertheless truly exist is in the poet’s memory. As a result, readers are left with the poem’s final, sad, echoing lines as a reminder that the “Binsey Poplars” they have skilled via reading the poem are not the actual trees, but only echoes of their former, living, inscaped selves.



Operates Cited

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Significant Operates. Ed. Catherine Philips. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2002.

Mariani, Paul. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life. New York: Viking, 2008.

Mikacs, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven: Yale U P, 2007.

Philips, Catherine. “Introduction.” Hopkins xv-xxxv.

—. “Notes.” Hopkins 307-399.