Poetic Inspiration for National Poetry Month

In part because it's National Poetry Month and in part because of Earth Day yesterday, I thought I'd share a pair of poems that I always find inspirational:

"Inversnaid" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

and [in Just -] by E. E. Cummings

rather than pasting the words, here's a video of Cummings himself reading the poem (EDIT: that is, the audio is of his reading, with video added--I didn't realize until just now that how I wrote it could be misleading)



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