Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins Protesting the Cutting Down of Trees

As with Mew, I share with Hopkins a visceral reaction to the cutting down of trees I've known.

Binsley Poplars

felled 1879

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 havok unselve

                    The sweet especial scene

Rural scene, a rural scene,

Sweet especial rural scene.