Victorian Poems–Urban Studies by Hopkins

London

William Blake

 

The World is Too Much With Us

William Wordsworth

Binsey Poplars

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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 & river & 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 unselve 

The sweet especial scene, 

Rural scene, a rural scene, 

Sweet especial rural scene. 

Hurrahing in Harvesttime

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;

And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a 

Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

Majestic - as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! -

These things, these things were here and but the beholder

Wanting; which two when they once meet,

The heart rears wings bold and bolder

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

The City of Dreadful Night 

James Thomson

Part I

The City is of Night; perchance of Death
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the lucid morning’s fragrant breath
After the dewy dawning’s cold grey air:
The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity;
The sun has never visited that city,
For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.

Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
Though present in distempered gloom of thought
And deadly weariness of heart all day.
But when a dream night after night is brought
Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
Recur each year for several years, can any
Discern that dream from real life in aught?

For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
The while all change and many vanish quite,
In their recurrence with recurrent changes
A certain seeming order; where this ranges
We count things real; such is memory’s might.

A river girds the city west and south,
The main north channel of a broad lagoon,
Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon
For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.

Upon an easy slope it lies at large,
And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest
Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,
Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,
Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;
And eastward rolls the shipless sea’s unrest.

The city is not ruinous, although
Great ruins of an unremembered past,
With others of a few short years ago
More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement
In house or palace front from roof to basement
Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.

The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.
The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
Fulfils with awe the soul’s despair unweeping:
Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!

Yet as in some necropolis you find
Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
So there; worn faces that look deaf and blind
Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread,
Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
Or sit foredone and desolately ponder
Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.

Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,
A woman rarely, now and then a child:
A child! If here the heart turns sick with ruth
To see a little one from birth defiled,
Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
To meet one erring in that homeless wild.

They often murmur to themselves, they speak
To one another seldom, for their woe
Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow
To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,
Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.

The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain
Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,
Or which some moments’ stupor but increases,
This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.

They leave all hope behind who enter there:
One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
One anodyne for torture and despair;
The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave.

 

In the so-called "Romantic Era"--I detest these misleading names devised and applied by petty minds--industrialization and urbanization awakened some poets to the Satanic threat of progress. In the misnamed Victorian Era, the opposition mounted in proportion as industrial urban blight increased. Some poets rebelled by continuing the "Romantic" admiration of nature; others turned to pure art, but the link that connects Wordsworth and Hopkins with William Morris, D.G. Rosetti, and the "aesthetes" is their revulsion against the capitalist despoiling of the rural poor and the countryside.