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!
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.
Commentary
Gerard Manley Hopkins went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1863. As Helen Gardner says, his diaries "are full of sensitive observations on nature and poetic imagery" (xvii), and trees feature in one typical entry of early 1866: "Blunt buds of the ash. Pencil buds of the beech. Lobes of the trees..." (91). That Hopkins also noticed the poplars by the riverbank at Binsey, only a short walk from the centre of Oxford, is clear from this poem, which records his disappointment at registering their absence on a later visit. The regularly repeated heavy stresses of lines 3 and 5, along with the alliteration, produce a sound pattern that does more than simply drive home the assault on the trunks — it evokes the hurt felt by the poet himself. One after another, those elegant trees had been felled, he realises: the whole row. And after he has taken in the altered scene, it comes home to him with a dull final blow that not even a single one of them has been spared.
Poplars on the bank
of the Thames.
Equally dramatic here is the contrast between the force of these lines and the rhythmic lilt of the lines that recall the trees as they once were — a "fresh and following folded rank" that absorbed and filtered the sunshine, producing shadow patterns on "meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank." John Parham feels that the very process of photosynthesis is "rendered poetically" in the description of their leaves "'quelling' and — in a hungry, alimentary image — 'quenching'" the energy of the sun (208), and that the poet not only bewails the loss of a beautiful view, but also suggests the "stark ecological consequences of the loss" (209).
In the first part of the following stanza Hopkins blames not so much the workmen who hacked down these graceful and environmentally beneficial trees, as short-sighted humanity in general. What we have now of the countryside, he says, is vulnerable ("so tender / To touch, her being só slender"), and destroying even a small part of it can reverberate catastrophically. The example he gives here, of pricking an eye, which may lead to loss of vision, is very apt. Are we ourselves not already blind to the consequences of our actions? Had we not better leave well alone, in order to preserve not simply one "sweet especial scene," but the health of the inter-dependent, organic world (in short, the ecosystem) that we inhabit?
It is hard to see the "tension" that Parham senses in the poem "between elegiac, preservationist protest and ecological science" (208). Both seem to be in operation here, as Hopkins's deep interest in natural life and wonder at the creation of God co-operate to produce a warning that is even more profoundly relevant today: "O if we but knew what we do / When we delve or hew — / Hack and rack the growing green!"
Related Material
Commentary and photograph (taken on the riverside near the bridge at Kingston-on-Thames) added by Jacqueline Banerjee. You may use the image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the source and (2) link your document to this URL or cite it in a print document. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Bibliography
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose. Selected and edited by W. H. Gardner. London: Penguin, 1963.
Parham, John. Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010.
Created 3 July 2007
Photo added 28 June 2026