Andrew's Wiki
Binsey Poplars

Just About Hopkins

• Life
  • Only 3 poems published while living
  • Priest who went through serious religious doubt
  • Difficulties will lead you to better art and spirituality
  • A religious poet
• Style
  • Obsessive rhyming
  • Dense and flamboyant
  • Perfect style should reflect its age
  • Poetry should sound different from prose, “current language heightened”
  • Uses dialect, archaic words, neologisms
  • Needs to be heard and spoken, he claimed
• Neologisms
  • Sprung rhythm: a new metrical system
    • Count stresses, not syllables
    • So you feel the rhythm suddenly rushing or slowing, going from tranquil to tense
    • Doesn’t let you get comfortable in a certain meter because that is too dull and destroys individuality of the poem
    • Somewhere between traditional meter and free verse
  • Inscape: Collection of characteristics that mark its essence: its individual, distinctive beauty
• Themes
  • Celebration of God’s creation
  • Sense of fear, suffering, terror, God’s wrath
  • “Why are you doing this to me?”
  • The paterfamilias par excellence, God

Binsey Poplars

Content

• The grove of trees is felled in 1879
• Why does man mess up natural order and natural beauty?
• We never know the true meaning of our actions beforehand

Style

• Repetition (for reading aloud)
  • “Are felled, felled, are all felled”

Quotes

• “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been”
• “Not spared, no one / That dandled a sandalled / Shadow that swam or sank”