By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Binsey Poplars’ is one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s best-known lyric poems. It was written in 1879 shortly after he revisited the small hamlet of Godstow near Oxford, a few miles north of Binsey, to find that ‘the aspens the lined the river [Thames] are everyone felled’. Here’s this wonderful poem along with a few words of analysis.