O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew –
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender….
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 twenty
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), ‘Binsey Poplars’ (felled 1879).
When this was composed on 13th March 1879, the GWR (Great Western Railway) needed replacement brake-shoes for its engines on the Oxford line. The wood of poplars was used for that purpose. Hopkins associated respect for nature with regard for the Creator. It is not unlikely that the poet associated his lament with the words of Jesus as they were destroying him: ‘They know not what they do’ (Luke 23:34). But, ‘there is hope for a tree if it is cut down, that it will sprout again,, and that its shoots will not cease. Though it’s root grows old in the earth, and it’s stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But mortals die…. Will they live again? (Job 14:8-10 & 14).
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