bilingual | zweisprachig

Today’s poem is one that I have already posted once before, on Christmas Eve of 2006. So I will just copy-paste my exact words from back then.

I feel rather 19^th century this time, so here is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that I enjoy very much every time I read it. Mr. Hopkins had the gift of writing rhythmic verse and juxtaposing quite strange words combined with alliterations and rhyme. His poetry needs to be read out loud. One has to hear it in order to live it.

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.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

(Taken from Bartleby.com | http://www.bartleby.com/122/33.html)

~~~~~

Other poems for April

Poets.org: Raymond McDaniel, “Assault to Abjury”

Knopf: Richard Kenney, “Lightning Strikes the Protein-Rich Postcambrian Tide Pool”

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