Elizabeth McKee Books
Inversnaid
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
This book/scroll is one in a series of 2, on Arches Text Wove paper, signed in pencil at the end of the verse/scroll. Page size: 9 feet long x 6 inches high, on dowels (covered in Ugandan bark cloth) that bring the height of the scroll to 8 inches. Housed in custom clamshell box, Ugandan bark cloth over boards with hand-lettered and painted label on spine. Lettered with a brush in shades of brown gouache over paper that has been painted with acrylic washes in shades of brown with moss green highlights, reverse painted with gouache wash in shades of brown. The poem’s words rush, flow, and meander much as does the beautiful river that is its namesake the Inversnaid River, at the edge of Loch Lomond. While an homage to the rough, wild river and the mountains (Trossachs) through which it flows. The last verse is a very contemporary plea for nature.