Complete Text
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 so 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 unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
Summary
The poet mourns the cutting of his “aspens dear,” trees
whose delicate beauty resided not only in their appearance, but
in the way they created “airy cages” to tame the sunlight. These
lovely trees, Hopkins laments, have all been “felled.” He compares
them to an army of soldiers obliterated. He remembers mournfully
the way they their “sandalled” shadows played along the winding
bank where river and meadow met.
Hopkins grieves over the wholesale destruction of the
natural world, which takes place because people fail to realize
the implications of their actions. To “delve or hew” (dig, as in
mining, or chop down trees) is to treat the earth too harshly, for
“country” is something “so tender” that the least damage can change
it irrevocably. The poet offers as an analogy the pricking of an
eyeball, an organ whose mechanisms are subtle and powerful, though
the tissues are infinitely delicate: to prick it even slightly changes
it completely from what it was to something unrecognizable (and
useless). Indeed, even an action that is meant to be beneficial
can affect the landscape in this way, Hopkins says. The earth held
beauties before our time that “after-comers” will have no idea of,
since they are now lost forever. It takes so little (only “ten or
twelve strokes”) to “unselve” the landscape, or alter it so completely
that it is no longer itself.
Form
This poem is written in “sprung rhythm,” the innovative
metric form developed by Hopkins. In sprung rhythm the number of
accents in a line are counted, but the number of syllables are not.
The result, in this poem, is that Hopkins is able to group accented
syllables together, creating striking onomatopoeic effects. In the
third line, for example, the heavy recurrence of the accented words
“all” and “felled” strike the ear like the blows of an ax on the
tree trunks. However, in the final three lines the repetition of
phrases works differently. Here the technique achieves a more wistful
and song-like quality; the chanted phrase “sweet especial rural scene”
evokes the numb incomprehension of grief and the unwillingness of
a bereaved heart to let go. This poem offers a good example of the
way Hopkins chooses, alters, and invents words with a view to the
sonorousness of his poems. Here, he uses “dandled” (instead of a
more familiar word such as “dangled”) to create a rhyme with “sandalled”
and to echo the consonants in the final three lines of the stanza.
Commentary
This poem is a dirge for a landscape that Hopkins had
known intimately while studying at Oxford. Hopkins here recapitulates
the ideas expressed in some of his earlier poems about the individuality
of the natural object and the idea that its very being is a kind
of expression. Hopkins refers to this expression as “selving,” and maintains
that this “selving” is ultimately always an expression of God, his
creative power. The word appears here (as “unselves”), and also
in “As
Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Here, Hopkins emphasizes the
fragility of the self or the selving: Even a slight alteration can
cause a thing to cease to be what it most essentially is. In describing
the beauty of the aspens, Hopkins focuses on the way they interact
with and affect the space and atmosphere around them, changing the
quality of the light and contributing to the elaborate natural patterning
along the bank of the river. Because of these interrelations, felling
a grove not only eradicates the trees, but also “unselves” the whole
countryside.
The poem likens the line of trees to a rank of soldiers.
The military image implies that the industrial development of the
countryside equals a kind of (too often unrecognized) warfare. The
natural curves and winding of the river bank contrast with the rigid
linearity of man-made arrangements of objects, a rigidity implied by
the soldiers marching in formation. Hopkins points out how the narrow-minded
priorities of an age bent on standardization and regularity contributes
to an obliteration of beauty. Nature allows both lines and curves,
and lets them interplay in infinitely complex and subtle ways; the
line of trees, while also straight and orderly like soldiers, nevertheless
follows the curve of the river, so that their “rank”
is “following” and “folded,” caught up in intricate interrelations
rather than being merely rigid, efficient, and abstract. Its shadows,
which are cross-hatched like sandal straps and constantly changing,
offer another example of the patterning of nature. This passage
expresses something of what Hopkins means by the word “inscape”:
the notion of “inscape” refers both to an object’s perfect individualism
and to the object’s possession of an internal order governing its
“selving” and connecting it to other objects in the world. (For
more on Hopkins’s notion of “inscape,” see the commentary on “As
Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame.”)
The pricked eyeball makes a startling and painful image;
in case the readers have not yet shared Hopkins’s acute pain over
the felled poplars, the poet makes sure we cringe now. The image
suggests that when the trees disappear from sight, the ramifications
are as tragic as the loss of our very organ of vision. The implication
is that we are harmed as much as the landscape;
Hopkins wants us to feel this as a real loss to ourselves. Not only will
the landscape not be there, but we will no longer be able to see
it—in this way, it really is as if our eyes were punctured. For
Hopkins, the patterning of the natural world is always a reflection
of God and a mode of access to God; thus this devastation has implications
for our ability to be religious people and to be in touch with the
divine presence. The narrowness of the industrial mindset loses
sight of these wider implications. Hopkins puts this blindness in
a biblical context with his echoes of Jesus’ phrase at his own crucifixion: “Father
forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
