As we cross the solar border into summer, many may remark that this past spring was not very spring-like. With virus-chilled ghost-towns, biting cold winds, even snow in May (at least in Northeast Pennsylvania), spring seemed touched with something like death this year. Looking back, spring smelled and felt more like fall this year, making Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem about looking back, “Spring and Fall: to a Young Child” a worthy meditation as we mourn with the poem’s characters, a little girl named Margaret and her older companion, over the passing of things from freshness to forgetfulness. Even in the awakening of new life and its thriving, there comes the reminder of the fleetingness of things, that all that lives must die.
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.
The freshness of spring is a doomed thing by the onset of summer heat. “Nature’s first green is gold,” Robert Frost’s famous poem exults, even as it agrees with Hopkins’s by concluding: “Nothing gold can stay.” In “Spring and Fall”, Hopkins brings the seasons of spring and fall together in the eyes and the image of a young child, Margaret… Continue reading at the Civilized Reader.
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