Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins was modern before there was modern. For me that means he did more suggesting than explaining.

Take the line "A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth." Inversnaid describes a waterfall in Scotland. Hopkins could have said "the froth, soft and brown like a fawn and also like a bonnet puffed up by the wind," but how prosaic. The final verse is the weakest and most conventional. I feel sure Hopkins knew.

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      
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.


Halloo?