The Bodleian Libraries have recently acquired at auction a late autograph
draft manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'Binsey
Poplars'.
The last known major Hopkins manuscript to have been in
private hands, ‘Binsey Poplars’ is the most significant Hopkins item to
have come to the market in over forty years.
Image: Oxford Mail website
Image:Bodleian Library
The acquisition was
made possible by strong financial support from a number of individuals
and funding bodies, including the Friends of the Bodleian, the Friends
of the National Libraries and the V & A Purchase Grant Fund.
A Balliol man who converted to Catholicism whilst at Oxford, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) is regarded as one the
Victorian era's greatest poets. Very few of his poems appeared during
his lifetime, and he owes his posthumous reputation to his friend the poet
Robert Bridges, who edited a volume of Hopkins' Poems that first
appeared thirty years after his death in 1918. His revolutionary
‘difficult’ style, characterized by new rhythmic effects, influenced the
work of Modernist and later writers.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Image: Wikipedia
'Binsey Poplars' was
written in response to the felling of trees running alongside the Thames
in Binsey, a village on the west side of the city of Oxford. Hopkins
was a curate
at St Aloysius Church in the city when he wrote the poem. The
trees were replanted after the poem was first published in 1918 (the
poem seems to anticipate the ravages of the Great War), and there was an
outcry which I recall when they were felled again in 2004. The poem formed part of the
successful campaign to replant the trees. The poem has a very
particular local meaning but speaks to a much broader audience in its
plaintive evocation of spiritual desolation through the destruction of
nature.
The only other known manuscripts of ‘Binsey Poplars’
survive in four copies kept in the Bodleian. The Library stresses that the textual importance of
this newly acquired manuscript cannot be overstated. It has never been properly studied
and presents critical evidence of the evolution of one of the most
celebrated poems in the modern English literary tradition. It includes
important unrecorded and unpublished reconsidered readings, with
extensive autograph deletions, revisions and repetitions.
Dr
Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections, Bodleian Library,
said: "The Bodleian holds the world’s most important collection of
manuscripts by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is wonderful to be able to add
this draft of one of his most celebrated works to that collection. The
various revisions in the draft, particularly when studied alongside the
other drafts, give us a remarkable insight into how the poet crafts his
passionate lament on man's disregard for the sanctity of nature. It’s an
enduringly relevant poem everyone should know."
Adapted from the Bodleian website
I studied Hopkins for A-level English, and whilst I did not get a lot out of him then I recognised that in him and T.S.Eliot were the two amongst the poets we studied in whom I was aware of something powrful and insightful. I am still, forty years on, meaning to return to studyin them properly... Occasionally I do a little, and find them to be a very rich vein to explore. Anyway, worshipping at Hopkin's former church and a member of a college adjacent to Eliot's Merton I really have no excuse - other than laziness - for not looking further at these two writers.
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