Introduction

Abstract

Sometime around 1988, two literary experts agreed to sit down and read a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins that they had never read before. Not only did they read it, they also wrote down their thoughts as they progressed through the poem line by line. The poem was ‘Inversnaid’, and this is how it begins:

This darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down

Sometimes, the experts’ notes record comprehension problems. For example, one of them wonders whether ‘His’ in line 2 refers back to ‘burn’ in line 1. They also notice figurative language in many places and ponder ways of interpreting this. They both notice a metaphor in line I, for example, and wonder why the poem makes this comparison between a burn and a horseback: Does this metaphor suggest speed, or does it suggest the smoothness of a horse’s back, and does the horse’s dark, brown colour possibly suggest death? As the experts get close to the end of the poem, they respond in an increasingly evaluative manner. One of them feels that the writing is becoming ‘a bit loose’ and the other exclaims ‘Oh boy!’ in apparent dismay at the way things are unfolding. The complete narrative of these experts’ voyage through the poem is recorded for posterity in Short and van Peer (1989).