Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins


This is a very important poem for me personally. It was my first introduction to the work of this great nature poet. Much of Hopkins' poetry I cannot fathom by trying to understand it mentally. I have to read it out aloud and allow the rhythm and the sounds to paint the picture for me. I remember how I felt when I first read the last stanza of Inversnaid a couple of years ago: it was as if he was pleading for my very existence to be spared.

Matilda