[59] Spring and Fall, to a Young Child

Guest poem sent in by Kamal Janardhan <kamalaj@>

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

     -- Gerard Manley Hopkins

A bit about this poem, it takes a few readings to truly "get" it.  About a
little girl who weeps for the leaves that die in fall.  Hopkins language
here is a lot less compressed than most of his other works and hence in
being less ornate it ends up being startlingly elegant.

-----------------------------------------------------------
BIOGRAPHICAL SNIPPETS

  Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the great unsung poets, virtually unknown
  in his lifetime. We have his poetry today only because it was collected
  and published by his friends after his death. It has some of the obsessive
  ornateness and sentimentality of the Victorians, but also a startling
  musicality which is ahead of its time and ours.

  Hopkins began his adult life, like many others of his time and
  middle-class background, as an earnest student at Oxford, concerned with
  the minutest details of religious practice. Like many others, Hopkins
  wound up "swimming the Tiber", that is, going from the Church of England
  to the Church of Rome: and, like many others, he was received there by
  John Henry Newman. The feelings of the converts' families are exemplified
  by a Mrs. Arnold, who wrote to Newman, "Sir, you have now for the second
  time been the cause of my husband's becoming a member of the Church of
  Rome and from the bottom of my heart I curse you for it." Not content with
  this, she also threw a brick through the window of the church where her
  husband was being received. Hopkins died in Dublin in 1889, aged 44. The
  first collection of his poetry was published in 1918.

Kamal

From: "Rick Domas RCN Acct" <rdomas@>

To Whom It May Concern:

I was introduced to this poem in I believe a college (or was it high
school?) intro English lit course and fell in love with it from the
beginning.  Now, as I truly am older, bearing the weight of the deaths of
family members, friends and the horrible events of Sept 11 2001, the deeper
meaning of this poem is oh so clearly evident.

Rick in Needham

From: "Nutkin" <nutkin@>

This is one of my all-time favourite poems.  I studied Hopkins for
English A level, and whilst some of his poetry is quite difficult to
decipher, its musicality is always clear.  This one however has both
attributes - it sounds fabulous, with rising and falling cadences as you
recite it, and conjures up images and sounds of crumbling dead leaves.
I had to learn it by heart, and over 20 years later can recall it just
as clearly.  Thank you for including it.


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From: Jerry Craven <jcraven@>

Kamal--I found your Hopkins poem on the web at
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/59.html
    Someone has Hopkins' name wrong: his first name is Gerard, not
Gerald. Also, the title of the poem is "Spring and Fall, to a Young
Child."
               JCraven

From: Filmalinda@

As one of the other readers has already pointed out, you have not only the 
title of the poem wrong, but the author's name.  Appalling.

From: jodeci jodeci <zhuck2001@>

This is quite an eloquent poem and it's symbolism sparks fire in a romantic's heart. The poem speaks; Not just for itself but to the heart of the readers. It is a poem about the fall from innocense to experience the sudden realization of a mans mortality to a child

		
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