Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Spring and Fall
Gerard Manley Hopkinsto 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.
SELECTED BY JOSEPH FASANO
Hopkins’ system of “sprung rhythm” revolutionized the treatment of rhythm in English-language poetry, and although his idiom is idiosyncratic, he helped move English-language poems toward the cadences of speech, albeit (in his own case) the particular register of intense speech. In both its form and its content, “Spring and Fall” epitomizes the lyric poem’s attempt to both embody and resist the inevitable passage of time.
The final line of the poem comes back to me again and again throughout my life, and it has the power to do what poems can do: comfort us even when what they say is discomforting. They do this in virtue of having said the difficult thing in form, in structure, which allows us to feel its inevitability and rightness, and, ultimately, to forgive and accept it. In poetry, the form is the hope.
ABOUT JOSEPH FASANO
Joseph Fasano is the author of many books of prose and poetry. His latest books include The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024) and The Magic Words (Tarcher, 2024). He is the Founder of Fasano Academy, an online learning community dedicated to educating the “whole human being in a world of fragmentation.” His honors include the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Wordview Prize from the Poetry Archive, and a nomination by Linda Pastan for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year.”
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins, published by Penguin Classics, 1985. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his ‘creative violence’ and insistence on the sound of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was no staid, conventional Victorian. On entering the Society of Jesus and the age of twenty-four, he burnt all his poetry and ‘resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wish of my superiors.’ The poems, letters, and journal entries selected for this edition were written in the following twenty years of his life and published posthumously in 1918.
His verse is wrought from the creative tensions and paradoxes of a poet-priest who wanted to evoke the spiritual essence of nature sensuously, and to communicate this revelation in natural language and speech-rhythms while using condensed, innovative diction and all the skills of poetic artifice. Intense, vital, and individual, his writing is the ‘terrible crystal’ through which the soul—the inscape, the nature of things—may be illuminated.” (Source)
ABOUT GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Gerard Manley Hopkins is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the Victorian era. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I. Upon deciding to become a priest, he burned all of his poems and did not write again for many years. His work was not published until 30 years after his death when his friend… (more)
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ENDNOTES
- This is Day 14 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: longing • innocence • fall • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
