SECTION D (NON-AFRICAN POETRY) Consider the use of alliteration, assonance and repetition in the poem 'Binsey Poplars'

Answer Details

Gerard Manley Hopkins's Binsey Poplars mourns a row of aspen trees felled beside the river at Binsey. The poem's grief is intensified by its rich sound patterning, and alliteration, assonance and repetition are central to its music and meaning.

Alliteration

• Hopkins repeats initial consonants to bind lines and imitate action, as in the felling of the trees: All felled, felled, are all felled, where the recurring f falls like the axe.
• Phrases such as Of a fresh and following folded rank and wind-wandering weed-winding bank use clustered f and w sounds to convey the graceful order of the trees and the gentle motion of the riverbank.
• The alliteration knits the verse tightly together and gives it an incantatory, lamenting quality.

Assonance

• Repeated vowel sounds enrich the texture, as in the long, mournful vowels of quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, where the echoing sounds slow the line and deepen the elegiac tone.
• The recurring open and long vowels sustain the sorrowful, singing movement that suits an elegy for the lost trees.

Repetition

• Whole words and phrases are repeated for emphasis and emotional force: felled, felled, are all felled drives home the totality of the loss.
• The refrain-like lines Since country is so tender / To touch, her being so slender and the repeated strokes of havoc stress how easily and how completely nature can be destroyed.
• The reiteration of hew and delve, and the warning that ten or twelve / Strokes of havoc unselve / The sweet especial scene, hammers home the theme that a few careless blows can undo an irreplaceable beauty.

Combined effect

• Together these devices create Hopkins's characteristic "sprung rhythm" and dense musicality.
• The sound patterns enact the poem's grief, making the reader hear the rhythmic fall of the axe and feel the tender fragility of the natural world that human carelessness destroys.

Conclusion

Alliteration, assonance and repetition are not ornaments but the very heart of Binsey Poplars. They give the elegy its haunting music and force home its lament that once nature's delicate beauty is hewn down, it can never be restored.