Inversnaid – place of beauty, and inspired poetry

Talking to a friend tonight who spent the day at Inversnaid. No excuse needed for posting Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, but the reminder was enough. Few poets have written of a loved part of Scotland with more precise and sympathetic insight into the inscape of a captured corner of Scottish scenery. Hopkins, along with Clare, Dickinson and R S Thomas, open eyes and ears to the beauty of living things. Hopkins' prayer for the wilderness, those undisrupted places of displayed wildness, comes as a lament for countryside too easily consumed by human acquisitiveness. 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 fáwn-fróth	5
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,	10
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;	15
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

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