Gerard Manley Hopkins

Torn between his obligations as a Jesuit priest and his love for poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) declined to seek an audience for his work during his lifetime; the bulk of his poems were published posthumously in 1916. Hopkins was born in Stratford, England, to a wealthy family. After converting to Catholicism near the end of his studies at Oxford, Hopkins entered the priesthood and, adhering to one of his vows, burned nearly all of his accumulated poems. He began to write again in 1875, when he was asked to commemorate the death of five Franciscan nuns who drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of England as they fled oppression in Germany. In the poem he wrote, entitled “Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins introduced what he called “sprung rhythm,” a meter designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech; this meter anticipated free verse and would influence new generations of poets. Inversnaid is a village near Loch Lomond in Scotland.

This darksome burn,¹ horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop² and in comb³ the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth5

Turns and twindles⁴ over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged⁵ with dew, dappled with dew,

Are the groins of the braes⁶ that the brook treads through,10

Wiry heathpacks, flitches⁷ 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;15

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.