Featured Poem: Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Our Featured Poem today comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins. Spring and Fall deals with the heavy themes of youth, mortality and loss in a delicate way.
The childhood realisation of the inevitability of time is one we all experience and is sensitively portrayed here in this evocative piece full of metaphorical layers.
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 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.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Share
Related Articles
Reader Revisited: An Interview with Mark Rylance, actor and writer of ‘I Am Shakespeare’
We're taking a trip down memory lane and revisiting articles from The Reader Magazine. This article first appeared in issue 29.…
April’s Monthly Stories and Poems
The clocks have not long changed to herald the longer hours of daylight, making us consider the passage of time…
Reader Revisited: Reading with Looked-After Children by Grace Frame
We're taking a trip down memory lane and revisiting articles from The Reader Magazine. This article first appeared in issue…