Poem for the day

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollcock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lakes fall 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 site 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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 89)

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