Poems for study » Inversnaid » Themes in Inversnaid
Conservation of Nature
This is an implicit, rather than explicit, theme in a poem that consists of description and prayer. Today, people are even more aware of the ‘tourist trap’: tourists love to visit beautiful, isolated places, so they become less isolated, so they lose their attraction. Hopkins was not yet anticipating this, but, as modern readers, we cannot avoid thinking about it.
- Does Hopkins’ poem make you want to visit the Scottish Highlands?
- Or is your engagement in it purely imaginative?
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 fáawn-fróth
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,
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.
Bookmark this page with: