Binsey Poplars Analysis

It's not hard to recognize a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. If you find your tongue twisting and the beat bouncing about halfway into the first line, chances are that you've run into what the poet cal...

To put it simply, our speaker is a tree fan. Leaves, trunks, branches—he celebrates the whole package. Why else would he be so totally bummed about the chopping of "my aspens dear" (1)? That firs...

Setting is everything in "Binsey Poplars." It's announced in the title (check out "What's Up With the Title?"), it's the central preoccupation of the speaker (check out "Speaker"), and it's key to...

Shhh—do you hear that? That's the sound of a Hopkins poem, which most closely resembles an auctioneer wrestling with a tongue-twister while stuck in an echo chamber. In short, a Hopkins poem is a...

We have a two-word title on our hands, gang, so let's tackle them one at a time. First up is "Binsey," a village in central England not too far from Oxford, where Gerard Manley Hopkins went to coll...

In terms of theme, Gerard Manley Hopkins really focused on just three: God, Nature, or some combination of the two. Lots of poets wrote about these Big Ideas, though, so for Hopkins' true calling c...

True to form, Hopkins puts a few funky turns of syntax in the way here, but in general there's nothing too tricky about a guy bumming about some lost trees. His sadness is pretty direct and underst...

Gerard Manley Hopkins both went to college in Oxford (Balliol College) and later worked there as a priest. He definitely knew the territory. (Source) Hopkins hated cities. As a priest and a teacher...

There is some violence in those trees being cut down, but our speaker's too bummed to think about anything sexy. This sad message is suitable for all ages.