Book 10
Spring and Fall - to a young child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Spring and Fall-to a young child
Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke 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.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
This poem was running through my head around the same time as I was having a conversation with my optometrist, Marc Teles, about making a book to fit into an eyeglass case. I said that the one that I was holding in my hand sort of looked like a coffin which prompted him to say that he had one from a line of glasses that they no longer carried that REALLY looked like a coffin. Then he pulled this out and offered it to me.
This has, perhaps wierdly, been one of my favorite poems for a long time. The text runs right across the whole piece sort of like fallen leaves.
