The Full Text of “Inversnaid”
1This darksome burn, horseback brown,
2His rollrock highroad roaring down,
3In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
4Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
5A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
6Turns and twindles over the broth
7Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
8It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
9Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
10Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
11Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
12And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
13What would the world be, once bereft
14Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
15O let them be left, wildness and wet;
16Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
The Full Text of “Inversnaid”
1This darksome burn, horseback brown,
2His rollrock highroad roaring down,
3In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
4Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
5A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
6Turns and twindles over the broth
7Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
8It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
9Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
10Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
11Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
12And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
13What would the world be, once bereft
14Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
15O let them be left, wildness and wet;
16Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
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“Inversnaid” Introduction
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"Inversnaid" is Gerard Manley Hopkins's exuberant celebration of untamed nature. Standing beside a wild, dark waterfall in the small Scottish town of Inversnaid, the speaker (a voice for Hopkins himself) gets caught up in its energy and beauty, until at last he feels that his "Despair" itself can drown and die here. The "weeds and the wilderness" offer humanity a special restorative power, the poem suggests—and humanity must protect and respect the weeds and the wilderness in return. Hopkins wrote this poem during a visit to Inversnaid in 1881, but like much of his verse, it wasn't published until much later. "Inversnaid" would first appear in the collection Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which Hopkins's friend Robert Bridges published in 1918, thirty years after Hopkins died.
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“Inversnaid” Summary
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This rich, dark stream, brown as a horse's back, roaring down along his high road of rolling rocks, sends white woolly foam swooshing through hollows and ripples, and at last falls down in fluted waterfalls into his home in the lake.
A wind-fluffed cap of fawn-brown foam spins, twirls, and dwindles over the soupy depths of a pool so deep black and angry-looking that it drowns Despair itself in its swirling waters.
The hills and valleys that the stream flows through are moistened and speckled with dew. So are the coarse heath, the feathery tufts of fern, and the ash tree (beautifully hung with berries like beads) that hangs over the water.
What would there be to this world if it lost all its wetness and wildness? Let them be left alone—oh, leave them alone, the wildness and the wetness. Long may the weeds and the wilderness live.
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“Inversnaid” Themes
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The Power, Beauty, and Value of Wild Nature
"Inversnaid" is a celebration of untamed nature. The poem's speaker (a voice for Hopkins himself, who visited the titular Scottish town in 1881) describes a "burn" (or stream) that runs through the hills of Inversnaid and descends in a cascade into Loch Lomond. Merely to look at this wild landscape, for him, is to feel enlivened, even healed, by its beauty and exuberance. The glorious "wildness and wet" of the natural world, "Inversnaid" suggests, is a priceless treasure—a treasure that humanity must honor and protect.
Gazing at "this darksome burn, horseback brown" (a swift, dark-watered brook) as it makes its way down its "rollrock highroad" (its high path of great tumbled stones), the poem's speaker finds himself caught up in its beauty and its irrepressible energy. This burn is no tame, pretty back-garden stream: its banks are overgrown by "wiry heathpacks" (dense, tangled shrubs), its waters move so fast that they churn up "foam" and "fawn-froth" (pale brown froth), and it falls at last into a "pitchblack" pool so dark it seems to be "fell-frowning" (menacingly grimacing) at him.
To this speaker, this scene's very wildness is exhilarating, refreshing, even healing. As he looks into the depths of the pitchblack pool, for instance, he feels as if he's watching his personified "Despair" itself "drowning" in its churning waters. Something about the freedom and freshness of this landscape offers him relief from his troubles, restoring him to a sense of possibility that the poem implies he hasn't had in a while.
A world "bereft / Of wet and of wildness," the speaker concludes, would thus be a paltry world indeed. He ends the poem with what might equally sound like a plea and a celebration: "O let them be left, wildness and wet; / Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet." The wilderness, this poem suggests, offers human beings an irreplaceable beauty and energy. Humanity owes the wilderness respect and protection in return—for humanity's own sake as much as nature's!
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Inversnaid”
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Lines 1-4
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.“Inversnaid” begins with a moment of pure seeing. The poem’s speaker stands in the countryside around Inversnaid (a small Scottish town on the shores of Loch Lomond) and watches a stream rolling down through the hills and cascading into the lake. He doesn't tell readers how he feels about this. Instead, he seeks the exact words for what he notices. In so doing, he also captures his intense emotional response: the way he sees what he sees tells readers all they need to know about what he feels.
The waters of this "burn" (the Scottish term for a stream), to begin with, are dark. No—they're "darksome," as the speaker puts it, coining a word that suggests that darkness is a rich, intrinsic part of these waters' nature (just as a "toothsome" thing inherently makes one want to bite into it). Perhaps, by sonic association, "darksome" also suggests something handsome, a robust beauty, in the dark water.
The darksome burn is fast-falling, foaming, and "horseback brown"—a moment of imagery that conjures up a dark, glossy, healthy color, but also hints at sheer speed. As the burn comes "roaring down" its "rollrock highroad" (a path of great tumbled stones), it's as exhilarating to watch as it would be to ride a horse at a gallop.
And as the burn rushes, it makes a glorious music. Hopkins captures the sounds and moods of the burn through vigorous alliteration and consonance:
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.Strong, buffeting /b/ sounds capture the water's force; rough /r/ sounds its "roaring" and its rocky path. The /c/ sounds of "coop and comb" (words Hopkins uses to describe the hollows and ripples in the water) clip and clop like water against stones. And lighter, gentler /f/, /l/, and /fl/ sounds get at the odd delicacy amidst all this power: the soft "fleece" of the "foam" that forms on the churning burn, and the elegant "flute[d]" columns it forms as it tumbles into the lake below.
Amidst all this sensuous delight, the speaker also reveals his response to the burn by personifying it. The burn isn't a thoughtless thing; it's a "he," and a "he" who possesses the landscape he travels through. This is "his rollrock highroad," "his foam." And when he tumbles into the lake, he "falls home." This is his domain.
For all that Hopkins personifies the burn, he doesn't imagine it as a human person, exactly. Instead, it's an elemental living force, with its own mysterious purposes and its own way of being. The watching speaker can see that the burn is living its own life. But as he stands looking over the darksome water, he can share in its exhilaration. The music of this first stanza makes his pleasure in the experience self-evident.
So does the rhythm. Hopkins writes this poem in what he called "sprung rhythm"—a kind of accentual meter, in which lines are measured by the number of beats they use, rather than arranged into steady patterns of metrical feet (like the da-DUM of iambs or the DUM-da-da of dactyls). This poem uses four beats per line, as readers can hear if they scan the first stanza:
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock high road roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.There's a pulsing rhythm here, then, but there's also a wonderful wildness. The stately lines 1 and 2 use a lot of two-syllable words that start with a stressed syllable, pulsing like a steady heartbeat: "darksome," "horseback," "rollrock," "roaring." Lines 3 and 4, by contrast, use quick, scurrying monosyllabic words, with many more unstressed syllables. The pace of the poem varies like the pace of the burn: sometimes grandly flowing, sometimes breathtakingly quick.
This poem's exuberant sounds will mirror the wild world the speaker gazes at—and, in doing so, let readers share in his full-body delight in that wildness.
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Lines 5-6
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth -
Lines 7-8
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. -
Lines 9-12
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. -
Lines 13-16
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.
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“Inversnaid” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
"Inversnaid" gets its distinctive flavor from its vivid, concentrated imagery. Hopkins's vibrant eye for the colors and movements of the natural landscape around Inversnaid works in tandem with his knack for coining energetic, precise words to describe what he sees (or lifting them from Scottish dialect, as need be).
In particular, Hopkins's descriptions of the stream condense color, energy, and motion into the same few words. When he describes the stream as a "darksome burn, horseback brown," he evokes the dark glossy shine of a horse's healthy coat. He also raises the idea of riding on horseback, capturing how exhilarating it feels just to watch the water go. And then there's the intensity of "darksome"—a word that suggests that darkness is intrinsic to this water, just as the temptation to bite is intrinsic to something we'd call "toothsome."
Similarly, a "windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth," a pale-brown cap of bubbles on the pool beneath the waterfall, might equally be puffed up into a floofy bonnet shape by the wind, or puffed along by the wind. Once again, the same few words simultaneously capture how something looks and how something moves. And once again, Hopkins connects the colors of this stream to a swift living creature: the "fáwn-fróth" calls up the image of a fawn, a baby deer.
On the move, this lively froth "turns and twindles." In "twindles," Hopkins invents a new word—perhaps a portmanteau of "twirls" and "dwindles," suggesting that the spinning froth gradually disappears into the "pitchblack" pool whose surface it rides. The contrast of colors here—deep "pitchblack" versus pale "fawn"—captures the range and wildness of the landscape the speaker admires. Delicacy and danger live side by side in this world.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Personification
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Alliteration
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Repetition
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"Inversnaid" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Darksome
- Burn
- His rollrock highroad
- In coop and in comb
- The fleece of his foam
- Flutes
- A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
- Twindles
- Féll-frówning
- Degged
- The groins of the braes
- Wiry heathpacks
- Flitches of fern
- The beadbonny ash
- Bereft
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A word of Hopkins's own coinage, suggesting that the dark color of the stream's waters is rich, tangible, and intense. (There might be echoes of words like "toothsome"—meaning delicious—and "handsome" here.)
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Inversnaid”
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Form
"Inversnaid" uses a simple, powerful, lively form. It's built from four quatrains, all written in Hopkins's favorite sprung rhythm—more on what that means in the Meter section of this guide—with four beats per line. Four stanzas of four lines with four beats apiece: this poem feels square and solid, firmly planted on the ground. (A steady, reliable rhyme scheme of couplets helps, too.)
Within this earthy structure, though, there's all sorts of liveliness and playfulness. The poem's rhythms swing and scamper, capturing the weedy wildness of the scene Hopkins observes. A balance of solidity and speed matches what the poem describes: a natural world that marries power to wild unpredictability. The personified "darksome burn" that flows down these hills, flinging froth about like a madman, also moves like he owns the place. This is "his rollrock highroad," and will remain so.
Or at least, the speaker—deeply moved by what he sees—hopes that it will remain so. The poem closes with Hopkins's urgent plea: "O let them be left, wildness and wet." Modern-day readers might see this poem as the grandfather of ecopoetry—verse championing conservation.
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Meter
Hopkins wrote "Inversnaid" in an innovative meter of his own design, a meter he called "sprung rhythm." Sprung rhythm is a kind of accentual meter, which means that the poem doesn't stick to any one type of metrical foot (like the da-DUM of the iamb or the DUM-da-da of the dactyl). There isn't a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables here, then: only a regular number of strong stresses, which can fall anywhere in the line. Here, Hopkins uses powerful four-beat lines.
Here's how that sounds in the first two lines:
This darksome burn, horse back brown,
His rollrock highroad roar ing down,These lines use a pretty regular pulse of stressed and unstressed syllables, so the lines move along as steadily as the stream does. But things get trickier later on—for instance, in lines 7-8. Hopkins here uses accent marks over the words he wants readers to stress:
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.The two stresses of "féll-frówning," falling one right after the other, slow line 7 right down, making the pool's grim frown feel all the more fearsome. Note, too, the trailing-away feminine endings of these lines (that is, the unstressed final syllables that fade the lines out). Most of the poem's lines use a masculine ending, closing on a bold, up-bouncing stressed syllable. Only in this darker moment—which raises the possibility of "Despair," even if only to drown it—does this softer, falling sound appear.
Here as elsewhere, Hopkins's sprung rhythm is above all expressive. The rhythms of "Inversnaid" move along at a swift, unpredictable, exuberant clip, full of the natural "wildness" the speaker so lovingly describes.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Inversnaid" uses an energetic rhyme scheme of couplets. That means that the poem rhymes in this pattern:
AABB CCDD
...and so on.
Working alongside the busy, densely-packed accentual meter, these rhymes take on a lot of momentum. One rhyme tumbles into the next—then off to the next couplet! (Occasional lively internal rhyme—for instance, in line 3's "in coop and in comb the fleece of his foam"—only strengthens that feeling of irresistible forward motion.)
It helps that nearly all of the rhyme words here are simple monosyllables, like "brown" and "down" in lines 1-2: only "frowning" (line 7), "drowning" (line 8), and "bereft" (line 13) linger for an extra beat. Readers might observe that all of these longer rhyme words are ones that give the poem its sadder, darker inflections: they offer tiny pensive pauses amongst the glorious "wildness and wet" of Inversnaid.
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“Inversnaid” Speaker
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Most of what readers can gather about this poem's speaker comes through what the speaker sees, and through how he sees it. As this speaker looks around at the countryside around Inversnaid (a small Scottish town), his avid, responsive eye registers every tumble of froth on the water, every jewel-like red berry on an ash tree. And everything the speaker sees feels so individual and alive to him that he needs to coin exuberant new words to capture what he's observing. That isn't just a blob of river foam, it's a "windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth," and it isn't merely spinning and shrinking, it's "twindl[ing]."
The speaker's radiant joy in the world isn't without a touch of shadow. Part of what so delights him in the scene is the way that the spinning water in the dark pools beneath him "rounds and rounds Despair to drowning"—lines that suggest he might have had a decent load of despair to throw off. And the poem's final cry—"Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet"—is both celebratory and defensive. As Hopkins knew all too well, the "wildness and wet" of much of the British Isles was under grave threat in the 19th century, in danger of being crushed or forever stained by industry.
In short, this speaker is a voice for Hopkins himself, with all his passionate love of nature and all his melancholy. Hopkins wrote this poem when he made a trip to the Scottish countryside after a long spell working in the grimy, crowded industrial cities of Liverpool and Glasgow, and his delight in being out in the fresh air again is palpable.
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“Inversnaid” Setting
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"Inversnaid" is set, as one might expect, in Inversnaid—a small town on the bank of Scotland's Loch Lomond, where a "burn" (a brook, in Scottish dialect) falls in a cataract down to the lake. Hopkins made only one relatively short visit to Inversnaid, but the wild landscape clearly made an impression on him (especially in contrast to Liverpool and Glasgow, the busy, grimy cities he'd been working in).
A big part of what delights Hopkins in this landscape is its "wildness." This isn't a manicured garden spot, but a place where water comes "roaring down" among the rocks and forms "pitchblack" pools, surrounded by "wiry heathpacks" (tangled shrubs) and "flitches of fern" (feathery, arrowy fern shoots).
This landscape is beautiful, certainly, with its "beadbonny ash" (an ash tree hung with bright berries) and its dew-dappled hills. But it's also tough and even a little menacing. When the speaker describes that pitch-black pool and imagines "Despair" drowning in its churning waters, there's a hint that, if Despair itself didn't drown there, a despairing person might drown as easily.
This landscape is vivifying and refreshing, then: its beauty takes "Despair" out of the picture. But it's also not precisely welcoming to the human observer. It's doing its own thing, living its own life. This separate life and energy is part of what moves Hopkins so.
Hopkins also seems to enjoy the particular Scottishness of this landscape. In his portrait of Inversnaid, he adopts Scottish dialect words—"burn" for brook, "braes" for hills, "bonny" for beautiful—and chews them over with gusto.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Inversnaid”
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Literary Context
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a poet of deep and ecstatic faith. Born into a staunch Anglican family, he converted to Roman Catholicism as an Oxford undergraduate. Much to his parents' horror, he later became a Jesuit priest. Though he'd always loved writing poetry, Hopkins burned many of his early works when he joined the novitiate (that is, became a priest-in-training), feeling that he should turn away from art to devote himself fully to God. His superiors, however, wisely encouraged him to see his poetry as a means of worship, and he returned to writing as a theology student in the 1870s. The resultant body of sensuous, poignant poetry reflects Hopkins's fervent belief that God suffuses everything.
In some ways, Hopkins was a poet of his time. He shares a painful nostalgia for a pre-industrial England with other Victorian writers—for example, Christina Rossetti (whom Hopkins befriended), Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens.
But in other ways, Hopkins's poetry connects to the deeper past and anticipates the future:
- Hopkins's fervent, religious love of nature hearkens back to the pantheistic Romantics of the early 19th century (like William Wordsworth) and the passionately Christian Metaphysical poets of the 17th century (like George Herbert).
- His exhortations to preserve and celebrate "the weeds and the wilderness" (and his laments for felled trees) also look forward to contemporary ecopoetry, which likewise honors and mourns a natural world marred by human greed.
- And his innovative style, with its freewheeling sprung rhythm and its richly interwoven sounds, is often seen as a precursor of the modernist free verse that would arise in the early 20th century.
Critics are particularly inclined to think of Hopkins as a proto-modernist because the bulk of his work wasn't published until 1918, when Hopkins's friend (and fellow poet) Robert Bridges released the posthumous collection Poems (in which "Inversnaid" first appeared). This book would deeply influence writers in the 20th century and beyond, from W.H. Auden to Dylan Thomas to T.S. Eliot.
Historical Context
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “Inversnaid” during a brief 1881 visit to the small Scottish town of that name. He was relieved to be there. A young Jesuit priest, he had previously been working in Liverpool and Glasgow—big industrial cities that were particularly grimy, smoggy, and impoverished during Hopkins's time. “Inversnaid” reflects Hopkins's joy at returning to the countryside after far too long in town.
In 1881, when Hopkins wrote this poem, Britain was in the teeth of the Second Industrial Revolution, a period of rapid technological advancement in both manufacturing and transportation. Of the many dramatic changes this era brought about in British society—a decline in rural populations, a rumble of socialist protest—most pressing for Hopkins was the harm to nature: exploitative mining and logging, air and water pollution from factories, and the expansion of urban and suburban spaces into what was once countryside.
Many Victorian artists and writers (and people from all walks of life, for that matter) viewed this destruction of nature with alarm and despair. For Hopkins, who saw the natural world as a manifestation of the divine, industrialized destruction was particularly painful. His celebratory cry at the end of this poem, "Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet," is also a sincere and fervent prayer that nature will endure.
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More “Inversnaid” Resources
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External Resources
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Inversnaid — See a photo of Inversnaid's waterfall—which, happily for Hopkins, has indeed been "left," surviving undisturbed.
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A Hopkins Chronology — Read a timeline of Hopkins's all-too-short life.
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Portraits of Hopkins — See some images of Hopkins via London's National Portrait Gallery.
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Hopkins in Scotland — Read an essay describing Hopkins's experience of Scotland.
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Hopkins's Legacy — Visit a website dedicated to Hopkins to learn more about him and investigate some recent scholarship on his work.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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