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I was nine or ten when I found this poem, maybe in one of my grandmother’s huge and heavy high school English anthologies. I remember laboriously copying it word by word, line by line, into my little blue diary, complete with the strange and inscrutable marks I would learn much later were called ‘scansion.’ What it was about I couldn’t have told you then, but it felt as if the poet somehow knew the silent longing that lived inside me and knew that I would need this poem. So he reached into the future and wrote it for me to find long after he died.

Spring and Fall, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

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. 

Click here for more information on Gerard Manley Hopkins. A version of this post first appeared here in 2019.

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