Spring and Fall: 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.
It was incredibly difficult for me to pick a poem of Hopkins to analyze because his work can be so deep and full of meaning that it can be easy to overlook something that is important. When I asked someone about a good Hopkins poem, she immediately responded, “Oh definitely Spring and Fall!!” and began reciting it line by line. For a rather short poem, this speaks volumes. From its easy to understand ryhme scheme to something as simple/complex (depending on how you look at it) as word choice. To get a different perspective than the ones i had already heard, i searched online for the meaning of this poem. One thing that struck me was on Sparknotes actually, and that is Hopkins choice of the work Fall over Autumn. Clearly a loss of innocence kind of poem, using Fall in the title immediately sets up the audience for the emotional complexities of the seasons. Indeed, in the fall we feel light and “springy,” whereas Fall has an entirely different conotation, which is also different from that of Autumn. Autumn suggests different colored leaves and the harvest (to me at least), while Fall sounds negative and a downward trend towards winter (death). Something as simple as one word can make such a difference, which is why I think interpretting poems in your own personal way is so critical.. so here is what I came to by the end of the day today. =P
This may sound a little off topic but whatever. Today I was taking this personality test and figuring out how i view the world and how the world views me. Apparently I am an Extroverted (vs. Introverted), iNsightful (vs. Sensor), Feeling(vs. Thinking), Perceptive(vs. Judgemental) person. So i read the whole profile thing and whatnot, but what surprised me was one thing that said something like I want to change the world and make a difference, but when I get old i will realize that it’s not possible and become bitter. Much more eloquently stated and neutral, but to that effect. I often think about this alot tho as a young person, can one person really make a difference? Am i just wasting my time? This poem reminds me of that feeling. The feeling of losing that protective barrier, whether it’s your childhood fantasies or exposing your dreams and goals, you feel like you are thrown into this hostile place, aka the real world. And through this realization, we tend to self-reflect on ourselves, which then makes us think about our mortality. I start by thinking, How much time I have, and then realize how much time i am Wasting by sitting around contemplating it!! I know I have not really analyzed this poem a lot through how it means, but i think different lines, words, and phrases have different levels of importance to different people. Although we are “mourning for Margaret,” in the end I believe that we are really mourning for ourselves, our loss of innocence, faith, and even our own life. in a sense, we are Margaret.
woo depressing. but being the “sappy optimist” that i am, don’t the seasons all come and go? they are cyclical; just because it is fall does not mean that spring will not return. We can regain our inner child, revive our faith, believe in an afterlife. why waste your life mourning over all this, when you could just as easily be enjoying life as much as possible? hmm. hope that made as much sense to you as it did to me. =)
