ABSTRACT
Hopkins wrote lnversnaid on a short visit, to the Scottish Highlands, made from Glasgow in the autumn of 1881. The poem is dated 28 September. lnversnaid is the name of a burn which flows into Loch Lomond. The quick, almost rollicking, flow of the couplets, and the impact of fresh, unusual words, makes it one of Hopkins's happiest poems. Some of the words are Scottish, some archaic, some newly-coined; but all are remarkably exact in conjuring up the swift brook and the heather-covered hills it flows through. The poignancy of the last stanza of Inversnaid goes, then, with Hopkins's fear in Ribblesdale, written in Lancashire, just as in God's Grandeur he had seen God's world wear 'man's smudge' and share 'man's smell'. This mood may help to explain the suddenly menacing image at the end of stanza. But the poem is not simply a description of the brook. It ends with a plea to let the wild beauty remain.
