The Bodleian Library in Broad Street revealed it has bought a draft of the poem Binsey Poplars by Gerard Manley Hopkins for £49,250 at Bonham’s auction house in London.

Binsey Poplars by Gerard Manley Hopkins is an angry poem about the felling of trees in Oxfordshire, while the anonymous Sweet Suffolk Owl describes the bird’s song as a “dirge for dying souls”.

A draft manuscript of Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' celebrated work Binsey Poplars is bought at auction by Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Hopkins' poem, entitled Binsey Poplars, felled 1879, tells of meddling humans destroying the beauty of nature. "To mend her we end her", he writes.

'Binsey Poplars' deals with the sadness the speaker feels upon learning that a bunch of his beloved trees have been cut down. It's a breathless poem, if you read it aloud, it's a wailing poem.

The poem was first published in 1918, 30 years after the poet's death. Hopkins, who died in 1889 at the age of 44, wrote Binsey Poplars while he was a curate at St Aloysius's Church in Oxford.