Inversnaid

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Teacher card

Published: 1918, in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Length: 16 lines, 114 words, 1 word in 23 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: rain
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,His rollrock highroad roaring down,In coop and in comb the fleece of his foamFlutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáawn-fróthTurns and twindles over the brothOf a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dewAre 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 bereftOf 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 (died 1889), Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918), lines 1798–1816 of Project Gutenberg ebook #22403. Public domain in Australia: the author died before 1955. Copied word for word and checked against the ebook.

What to do with it

One link and one task line for each activity. Send a student the one you want them to do, or print this page and hand it round; each link has a QR code.

Its lines are dealt for the sky in the weather poemsin weatherline · 16 lines · about 5–10 min
Task for students (you can change the sentence before you print; nothing is saved)See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
weatherline.popplepoetry.com/sources#ho-burn

Send the whole hand-out

This page’s link. Students open it, read the text and pick what to do; nothing asks them to sign in.

Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/hopkins-inversnaid · popplepoetry.com