"The Poplar Field" William Cooper (1784)

By Joaquín Pardo Laborde

& Iñaki Fierro

"The Poplar Field" William Cooper (1784)

Literary devices

Stanza analysis

Personification

“The winds play no longer, and sing in the leaves” & “My fugitives years are all hasting away”

Alliteration

“cool colonnade” “felled, farewell” “of my favourite field” “long lie as lowly” “perishing pleasures”

Metaphor

“Though his life be a dream” Life is described as very beautiful and pleasant.

“My fugitive years are all hasting away, And I must ere long lie as lowly as they” the speaker means he is getting old very rapidly, and that by the time another tree grows, he will be already dead.

There is a very clear extended metaphor when the speaker seats in the trunk, and starts reflecting. In that situation, there is a metaphorical comparison between his life and the trees; that his life would end as the trees were in that same moment; that sooner or later, he would die as somehow happened to the poplars.

"My fugitive years are all hasting away,

And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,

With a turf on my breast, and a stone at my head,

Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead."

What the speaker is describing in this stanza (the fourth one) by this metaphor “My fugitive years are all hasting away, And I must ere long lie as lowly as they” is the fact that he is getting old very rapidly, and that by the time another tree grows, he will be already dead. He uses these visual images, “a turf on my breast” and “a stone in my head”, to describe how he would be by that time: he’ll be dead, lying underground inside a tomb, and the only memory of him would be the gravestone with his name above his dead body.

Themes

A brief summary of the poem

The author develops the theme of death in the fourth stanza, when he compares his life to the felled trees. At some point, one of his reflections was that, sooner or later, he would end up as the trees - this is an extended metaphor for his future death, comparing it to the trees being cut down - and the theme of memory is developed when he seats down at one of the trunks of what used to be poplars, and remembers how that field used to be before the trees were felled. It’s a memory of what used to be good times for him, and which they are no more.

The speaker returns to the “poplar field” after 12 years since he had visited it for the last time. Many things have changed since then. The poplars have been felled, and now just their trunks remain, where he sits and thinks of what that place used to be, making reference to the shade that trees used to provide, and to the blackbird who has gone, because the trees no longer protect him from the heat. He starts reflecting about life, and comes to the conclusion that he will, at some point, end as the trees, referring to his death.