to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving 
Over Goldengrove unleaving? 
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? 
Ah! ás 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 wíll weep and know why. 
Now no matter, child, the name: 
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. 
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed 
What heart heard of, ghost guessed: 
It ís the blight man was born for, 
It is Margaret you mourn for.


From Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose. Published by Penguin Classics. Copyright © 1985.

I have always loved this classic poem, the way is sounds in your ears when read out loud–it’s so lovely to read and one of the first poems I could recite from memory. It is a melancholic poem, beginning with the speaker questioning a child’s ability to grieve the falling of leaves. How can she be upset? She is a child, so young and not yet experienced in the ways of sorrow and loss. We are then invited to grieve for her, for the inevitable loss of her innocence. We do not remain children forever, and when she enters into adulthood, she will experience much greater sorrows than the shedding of leaves in autumn. The title, “Spring and Fall,” further emphasizes life’s propelling forward from youthful blossoming to fading beauty and eventual death. Hopkins, a Catholic convert and Jesuit priest, calls this the blight we were born for. Sometimes a work of art moves us toward contemplation by its very pessimism.  What thoughts does the melancholy in this poem stir in you?

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