THE WORLD CHARGED BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 99confounded / Rural, rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers.” He liked walking
to a village across the Thames River where aspens in a double row hung over
the towpath. One letter reports, “I am sorry to say that the aspens that lined the
river are everyone felled.” Why? For use as “shoes,” locomotive brake blocks
for the Great Western Railway penetrating the Thames valley.
“Binsey Poplars” has this note: “felled 1879.”
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!...
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.
Nowadays we ’d welcome public transit. Back then, his anguish pulls out all
the stops: repeating sounds, rhythmic surprise, rare wording. These lines have
often been set to music, and Hopkins himself loved composing. Once he put
some eighteenth-century pastoral verse to music: “I groped in my soul’s very
viscera for the tune and thrummed the sweetest and most secret catgut of the
mind.” His poems live on this word music, though few with the environmental
fervor of “Binsey Poplars.”
What ’s more, he was a draftsman who early on hoped to become a painter.
Visually, nothing fascinated Hopkins more than rushing water. Writing about
a swift brook “roaring down” into Loch Lomond, he asks,
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.Ted Hughes called this one of those poems that “are better... than actual
landscapes.” Even Hopkins’s peace-seeking “Heaven-Haven,” subtitled “A nun
takes the veil,” goes to the sea for elemental force: