How to Enjoy Reading a Difficult Poem
An audio lesson on connecting poetry with our experience and a wild nature poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins
This poem leads me back to the deeply emotional experience I’ve had with nature, and that experience leads me back to the poem.
Sit back and listen to the audio lesson above,1 then read and respond to the poem below. (May I recommend a bracing cup of strong Earl Gray tea? Or perhaps a walk in the woods with your earbuds in.)
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 wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
As I say in the audio lesson, I am percolating an essay that explores the decimation of the nature corridor behind my backyard. To help, I’m meditating on the above poem alongside Wendell Berry’s “Resurrection of the Wild” and Robert Frost’s “An Encounter.” These three poems are guiding me as I mourn the loss of a space that was packed with vibrant natural life.
Wendell Berry says,
there will be the second coming
of the trees. They will come
straggling over the fences
slowly, but soon enough.
. . . but I say, not soon enough. It will take years for the small trees and large shrubs along our powerline path to grow back, for the nesting birds and rabbits and deer to return. I imagine rewinding the clock a year and a half, hanging a sign around my neck that reads “Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness Yet!” and standing in front of the trucks that plowed this burgeoning place to the ground. But enough about me.
What about you? (Please share your answers in the comments!)
How do you feel about this poem (or Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, in general)?
Are there any words, phrases, or lines that stand out to you as evocative or beautiful, even if you don’t fully understand them?
Is there any natural space or nature experience in your life that helps you connect with the words of this poem?
Next step in my Substack life: learn to cut “umm” from audio files. Also, learn to stop saying “umm” so often.
I love Hopkins. I like his sprung rhythm concept, although I do not always get it. I love. his spondees and alliteration. I read his works and am dazzled. Then I stand back and break them down to individual sentences or phrases and that helps me to get the imagery. I love poems that send me to the dictionary. "Degged" turns out to mean precisely what I thought from the context.
It took me a good reading before I could figure out the meaning of "burn" and I loved the unusual use of "flutes".
Thank you so much! And a hat-tip to Robert Bridges.
Hopkins is such an advocate of nature and its magnificence. It's amazing to think that he created such a "contemporary' poem almost 150 years ago.
I like Berry. I love the allusion to Yeats:
Thank you for referencing "An Encounter". What a lovely poem!