Poetry Thursday: Thinking of Scotland

Thinking of Scotland brought to mind a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He is one of the poets we studied at high school, and I've loved his poems ever since. Although he wasn't Scottish, this particular poem appears to be about a spot that is not too far from where we will be staying:

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.

- Gerard Manley Hopins, 1844 - 1889

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