The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade
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.
Like much of John Clare’s work, Cowper’s ‘The Poplar Field’ is a poem responding in part to the destruction of the English landscape caused by landowners using the Enclosure Acts to force the rural poor off their small holdings in order to farm more profitably by dividing the land into larger fields enclosed by fences, hedges and ditches, felling trees, damming rivers and destroying habitats of animals, birds and insects. The jaunty metre Cowper employs in ‘The Poplar Field’ seems ill-suited at first to a poem about lost years and environmental vandalism. Anapaestic tetrameter is more often used for comic effect (as in Dr Seuss’s poems), but where used irregularly — as it is here by Cowper — it becomes disconcerting, and can be employed for serious effect, as it is also in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ — as well as in Eminem’s song ‘The Way I Am’, apart from its chorus (most rap songs use irregular tetrameter).
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NOTES:
1. William Cowper – 1731 – 1800. It’s pronounced Cooper.
2. The Inclosure Acts[a] created legal property rights to land previously held in common in England and Wales, particularly open fields and common land. Between 1604 and 1914 over 5,200 individual acts enclosing public land were passed, affecting 28,000 km2.
Wikipedia