Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:
Today’s poem, “Inversnaid” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is included in Ted Hughes’ Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing.’ In the chapter “Writing about Landscape” he writes, “We all respond to beauty spots … Usually these places are famous for one thing—they look wild. . . . These are the remains of what the world was once like all over.”
Hughes describes the Hopkins poem below as “a scene in sharp focus: all gloom and brilliance, the exhilaration and uneasy sunniness of a bleak, rather lonely place … so clean and right that whenever I see anything like it in actual scenery I think—’It’s almost as good as Inversnaid.'”
It may well be one of my favorite poems of all time, and GMH one of my most beloved poets. See what you think – here’s “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 of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
(Photo by Espen Klem)
The Dish 