Seeing Inversnaid: Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Inversnaid," and the Ecological Eye

Abstract

Seeing Inversnaid:Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Inversnaid," and the Ecological Eye Kate Flint (bio) inversnaid 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 fáwn-fróth 5Turns 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, 10Wiry 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; 15Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.1 What did Gerard Manley Hopkins see on September 28, 1881? On this Wednesday, he made a day trip from Glasgow, taking a steamer up Loch Lomond to the small settlement of Inversnaid. He might have hoped for better weather: as he wrote some six years later in a letter to a friend from his Oxford days, Mow-bray Baillie, "The day was dark and partly hid the lake, yet it did not altogether disfigure it but gave a pensive or solemn beauty which left a deep impression on me."2 Hopkins spent just a couple of hours there, walking up the [End Page 437] road at the side of Arklet Water, which descends into the loch at this point. The poem seems to have been written on the spot. As well as asking what Hopkins saw, it may be more apt to ask how he saw. How had his habits of looking been formed? What might the relationship be between his early practice as a sketcher and the closely observed detail of the poem's first three stanzas? What images of Inversnaid—and of this area of the Scottish Highlands more generally—might he already have formed, and carried with him, in his mind's eye? And since, as Robert Bernard Martin puts it in his definitive biography of Hopkins, the last quatrain of Hopkins's qua-tern "has become in our own day something of a manifesto for the forces of conservation," I shall consider whether this poetic manifesto may have become too familiar.3 But its omnipresence as poetic homage to the importance of wildness deserves further exploration, leading us to ask about the particular type of wildness that is being invoked here and how it is being both evoked and tamed in poetic form. Finally, how might we reanimate Hopkins's call for ecological awareness by reading it alongside contemporary visual art that, rather than seeing the landscape of the Scottish Highlands as something grand and timeless, addresses its precarity and fragility? ________ As Hopkins alighted from the steamer, he would have seen on his right the waterfall made by Arklet Water plunging into the loch. Before setting out on his walk, however, he would have been part of the crowd of tourists heading up from the pier toward the Inversnaid Hotel. Originally built as a hunting lodge by the Duke of Montrose in 1820, the building had rapidly been converted into a hotel, as tourism started to take off in this relatively accessible region of the Highlands. An 1880s trade card brings home the proximity of pier, hotel, and falls (see Fig. 1). Those of his fellow travelers who just wanted a view of the impressive drop of water would have made a sharp right-hand turn, which led to the flat, single-span bridge over the Arklet that featured in numerous late nineteenth-century commercial photographs and stereographs of the area (see Fig. 2). A pathway leads from the falls along the shore of Loch Lomond. But Hopkins would seem to have looped around the back of the hotel and to have followed the old garrison road that closely hugs the bank of the Arklet, although it is hard to tell how much of the rushing water would have been visible through the trees. Norman White, in his biography of Hopkins, describes the landscape of "Inversnaid...