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