“Spring and Fall”
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.
“Spring and Fall” is a poem about beginnings and endings. Hopkins wrote this pattern into the very structure of the poem, which consists entirely of rhyming couplets–pairs of lines with a clear start and finish. These lines are composed of mostly austere language. In “The Classic Hundred Poems,” literature professor William Harmon noted that of the poem’s 90-some words, only three are not short Germanic words.The poem’s title also emphasizes beginnings and endings. The “spring” mentioned in the title is a double (or maybe quadruple) entendre. It’s the season of spring set up in contrast to the season of fall. It’s the beginning or springtime of life that the child Margaret is experiencing. It’s echoed in the “sorrow’s springs” of line 11, the brokenness of our world that leads to loss and grief; and finally, it’s Margaret’s growing awareness of that brokenness.
