The poplars are fell'd... Ten poplar trees in Lichfield's delightful Beacon Park have been felled by the council, on the perfectly good grounds that they were shedding huge branches onto well frequented paths. But it is always sad to see them go. As Cowper put it, in a beautifully crafted poem lamenting the loss of a line of poplars by the river Ouse near his home in Olney –
The Poplar Field
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade,
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.
Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view
Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew,
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.
The black-bird has fled to another retreat
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene where his melody charm’d me before,
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.
My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head
E’er another such grove shall arise in its stead.
’Tis a sight to engage me if any thing can
To muse on the perishing pleasures of Man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a Being less durable even than he.
Poplar trees are more liable than most to be cut down, simply because they are so brittle and so prone to shed branches, or indeed be blown over (they are shallow-rooted). But they are glorious things in their prime – trees with tremendous presence, beautiful alike to the eye and the ear (the rustling of their leaves is one of the loveliest sounds of summer). Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins lamenting his lost poplars – at Binsey, a village on the edge of Oxford – and deploring man's impact on nature, in language freed of all Cowperian restraint:
Binsey Poplars
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 só 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 únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
(The Binsey poplars, by the way, were replaced with a fine avenue that lasted until 2004.)
Hopkins's evocation of the poplar's restless presence in the opening lines is vivid, but I think Richard Wilbur catches it supremely well in this short poem, which pairs the poplar with the sycamore, another tree that grows abundantly in Lichfield, that city of trees –
Poplar, Sycamore
Poplar, absolute danseuse,
Wind-wed and faithless to wind, trowelling air
Tinily everywhere faster than air can fill,
Here whitely rising, there
Winding, there
Falling to earth with a greener spill,
Never be still, whose pure mobility
Can hold up crowding heaven with a tree.
Sycamore, trawled by the tilt sun,
Still scrawl your trunk with tattered light, and keep
The spotted toad upon your patchy bark,
Baffle the sight to sleep,
Be such a deep
Rapids of lacing light and dark,
My eye will never know the dry disease
Of thinking things no more than what he sees.
And here, for good measure, is one more poplar poem, by Siegfried Sassoon, recalling a moment of something like bliss –
A Poplar and the Moon
There stood a Poplar, tall and straight;
The fair, round Moon, uprisen late,
Made the long shadow on the grass
A ghostly bridge ’twixt heaven and me.
But May, with slumbrous nights, must pass;
And blustering winds will strip the tree.
And I’ve no magic to express
The moment of that loveliness;
So from these words you’ll never guess
The stars and lilies I could see.