"What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet, Long live the weeds and the wildness yet"
About this Quote
Hopkins doesn’t plead for nature; he stages a miniature uprising on its behalf. The line pivots on a deliberately stark thought experiment: strip the world of “wet and wildness” and you don’t get cleanliness or progress, you get a kind of spiritual desiccation. “Bereft” is the tell - this isn’t landscaping, it’s mourning. He’s writing from an industrializing England where “improvement” meant drainage, enclosure, smoke, and the steady conversion of unruly commons into usable property. In that context, “wet” isn’t just weather; it’s habitat, muddle, fertility, the conditions that let life be more than managed.
The music matters as much as the message. Hopkins’s sprung rhythm and the repeated “let them be left” sound like an incantation and a protest chant at once: a refusal to smooth the world down into something efficient. He pairs “weeds” with “wildness” to sabotage the category of the useless. Weeds are plants without permission - their value is precisely that they ignore our plans. That’s the subtext: the human desire to control nature is also a desire to control meaning, to decide what counts as worthy, beautiful, productive.
Hopkins, a Jesuit, also loads this with theology. Wildness isn’t chaos; it’s creation still humming with God’s “inscape,” the irreducible uniqueness of things. “Long live” flips the script: the poet isn’t elegizing a lost Eden as much as rallying readers to defend the messy, wet, noncompliant world before it’s engineered out of existence.
The music matters as much as the message. Hopkins’s sprung rhythm and the repeated “let them be left” sound like an incantation and a protest chant at once: a refusal to smooth the world down into something efficient. He pairs “weeds” with “wildness” to sabotage the category of the useless. Weeds are plants without permission - their value is precisely that they ignore our plans. That’s the subtext: the human desire to control nature is also a desire to control meaning, to decide what counts as worthy, beautiful, productive.
Hopkins, a Jesuit, also loads this with theology. Wildness isn’t chaos; it’s creation still humming with God’s “inscape,” the irreducible uniqueness of things. “Long live” flips the script: the poet isn’t elegizing a lost Eden as much as rallying readers to defend the messy, wet, noncompliant world before it’s engineered out of existence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
|---|---|
| Source | "Inversnaid", poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins — contains the lines beginning "What would the world be, once bereft / Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet." |
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