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Poems for the 21at Century

A platform to express and share your enthusiasm and passion for poetry. What are your treasured poems and poets? Don't hesitate to showcase the poems you've penned yourself!
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DWill

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Re: Poems for the 21at Century

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G. M. Hopkins?
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century

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None other than G. M. Hopkins. Always relatable!
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Saffron

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Of course, it is Gerard Manley Hopkins! Thanks, DWill and Sarena for playing along with me.
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DWill

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Saffron wrote:Of course, it is Gerard Manley Hopkins! Thanks, DWill and Sarena for playing along with me.
What's the title of the poem? I wasn't sure about the poet, because I don't think of Hopkins as a nature poet in some sense of the word. I like the pairing of "wet" with "wildness." It's unexpected. Easy to speak in favor of wildness, maybe without really experiencing it. Less easy to praise the wet, because being wet or in the wet is often uncomfortable and messy.
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Here is the whole Hopkins poem. I am not sure about the whole thing but love the last stanza. I need to explore some of the words in the first 3 stanzas so I understand what he is describing. I assumed the title was a place name and indeed, it is. I was struck by the pairing of wet and wildness for the same reason you, DWill, expressed.

Inversnaid is a small rural community on the east bank of Loch Lomond in Scotland, near the north end of the loch.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

33. 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.
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