*Oct 04 2025 | Spring and Fall

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

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.

Tim, this was worth the anxious waiting. (Silly mother hen I am.) The Poetry Collective's first 19th century poem.

I need to spend more time with it. I'll be back tomorrow.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was born to an upper-middle class Victorian family outside of London. His father was an insurance adjuster and minor poet, novelist and critic. He studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford. He converted to Catholicism, being received into the church by John Henry Newman, and subsequently entered the Jesuit order. As was common at the time, this estranged him from his family and many friends. Before joining the Jesuits he burned all his poetry, but soon started writing it again. He later taught Greek and Latin at University College Dublin. He died of typhoid fever at 44. He suffered bouts of depression over much of his life. The poem was written in 1880.

Some other favorites of mine among this poems:
Pied Beauty (short) https://poets.org/poem/pied-beauty
God's Grandeur (short) https://poets.org/poem/gods-grandeur (for some reason read by King Charles, then Prince of Wales https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEuVJNRY4P8)

Natalie Merchant (formerly of 10,000 Maniacs) put "Spring and Fall" to music on a recent album.

* Here's the album version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUySH7Q6NNM
* She did a TED talk with "Spring and Fall," adding some explanatory material https://youtu.be/vXVCf5VTHrw?t=982

Hopkins wrote in a meter he called "Sprung rhythm" (see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprung_rhythm), that reads somewhat like free verse, but with a fixed number of stressed syllables. He printed his poems with accent marks to indicate the feet. I left them off because I think they're distracting if you don't know what he's doing. The meter is in any case pretty clear. A marked version is here: https://poets.org/poem/spring-and-fall

>2 DebiCates: Sorry. Busy day.

Oh wow! Heartbreaking and beautiful all swirled together.

When I think about it I reckon I spend a good deal of time fighting against this happening. Perhaps naively; I'm not sure, but I like to believe it is not inevitable that our hearts grow colder or despondent. I'm still 6 years old Godammit!

Being able to read a little about Gerard Manly Hopkins along side the poem and see where he was coming from makes it sadder. I want to shout another piece of poetry at him! Something about not going gently in to that goodnight. Thank you Dylan Thomas .

"Over Goldengrove unleaving?" - I would love to hear everyone's thoughts about what Goldengrove is, or where even?

Thank you @timspalding for sharing, like @DebiCates said - this was worth waiting for.

Wonderful pick, and very topical in the midst of spring and autumn for the southern and northern hemispheres, respectively.

There are a few bits I'm not quite getting — what Goldengrove is I haven't a clue, and 'Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie' loses me completely.

However, the overall shape of the poem is very compelling to me. A young child, so new to experiencing the earth and feeling such big emotions, is grieving the changing of the seasons, and the wise older adult steps in, ostensibly to dismiss her feelings as childish; you think you care for the leaves? As you grow older, you will not be stirred so. Ah, but then the narrator subverts this line of thinking: 'you will weep,' she is told, and her feelings are not dismissed as childish but in fact accepted as universally human: 'sorrow's springs are the same... it is the blight man was born for'. She is mourning the changing of the seasons as the passing of time; perhaps at her age, a season of summer leisure over. For what else do we mourn? Time gone by to which we cannot return, opportunities we did not take for which time has run out, lost loved ones to whom we cannot return, perhaps even we mourn the person we used to be.

Margaret joins a very human pastime.

>1 timspalding: Back to the drawing board for me, Tim, because I was going to go with Gerard Manley Hopkins myself but a different poem.

I love the innocence expressed in the short poem and the mourning for the passing of the seasons.

My own favourites are "As Kingfishers catch fire" (one of my very favourite poems) and "Binsey Poplars" and I was going to go with one or the other.

This is a wonderful introduction to Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I have heard of I've never really stopped to reaally, really read his poems, and wow, this one stopped me in my track.

And the resources in >3 timspalding: were helpful and got me looking at the books that I have, recalling the mention of 'spring rhythm' Ode Less Travelled, where Stephen Fry discusses this and GM Hopkins as a poet, and also found I had this poem and 5 others in Best of Poetry: Thoughts that Breathe and Words that Burn.

What struck me is how the words: " ... Goldengrove unleaving / Leaves like ...", the alliteration "Sorrow's springs are the same.", and how naturally the the last words in the lines rhyme (I was going to say rhyming couplet until I noticed line 7, 8, 9 is a rhyming triplet. But noting these is a distraction to what the speaker sees of Margaret, understanding her sadness / grief.

I too was puzzled by Goldengrove and wanwood. Google search said they were words invented by Hopkins. Goldengrove tells what it is (a golden grove) and wanwood is two words put together, wan and wood, to indicate the woods in decline (wan) but also that indicating there is a waxwood, thus the natural ebb and flow of the life of a wood.

Poor Margaret, grieving because the leaves are falling in the Autumn, ending the Summer, heralding the cold Winter. The adult narrator is being honest with her (or, in his thoughts of her, is being honest). He knows the whole world is destined to become leafmeal, going from beauty to blight. Nor is it just Fall, but all the seasons that contribute to the change of our world, each season in its succession, each year in its succession. Within Spring is Fall, they do not exist separately.

She herself is at this moment fresh, is Spring, but will become Fall, progressing toward the inevitable, just as all the ghosts know. She will learn to lament the changes less and less, learn to understand what we all come to accept.

It is a hard lesson, and perhaps a too cold lesson for a little girl experiencing her first grief. The narrator, by taking time to expound upon it, sympathizes with her tenderly. He knows what she doesn't know yet, that she is grieving for herself just as, presumably, he grieved for himself.

Like Tonja I still feel I am 6 too, dagnabbit!

But there are undeniable and lamentable changes in my 60s. I lament them more frequently but can't quite grieve like I once would have. Instead, I notice, then accept. Just yesterday I drove in a part of my neighborhood I hadn't been through in a while, and noticed some changes I didn't like, some degeneration. Then I remembered how that happened to both of my grandmother's neighborhoods where they had lived since I was a girl and I had thought how they were bright and beautiful places to visit. But slowly their neighborhoods declined around them, simultaneously as they too declined. Newer sections around town grew up and were the new fresh and beautiful.

My grandmothers once were Margaret. I once was Margaret.

A lovely poem, albeit a hard one to take to heart, though we must. And will.

Now I want to learn more about Hopkins. Thank you for this poem, Tim.

>5 GraceCollection:

Some specific thoughts:
* I think Goldengrove is the child name--or perhaps the family's or just the poet's name--for a grove of trees she's visited when it was beautiful and yellow with autumn colors. Now the leaves are falling.
* Unleaving is a coinage for "losing its leaves."
* "Wanwood" would be wood without leaves, or perhaps leaves without wood; the wood is wan—weak, sickly, thin—because it is bereft, dying.
* Leafmeal means leaves in broken piles. So leaf, then -meal tends to meal "broken" or "in fragments," like piecemeal, cornmeal.

>3 timspalding: Tim, thank you for those links. I just watched Natalie Merchant's plain song version of the poem (both videos) and got chills.

I too contemplated Hopkins for my turn, but Tim's selection wasn't a spoiler for me: I don't know his work well enough to pick a specific poem. His example of sprung rhythm or meter is fascinating, and I once read that it might seem complicated to read about it, but our ears are fairly attuned to it if we get out of our own way and just listen for it. I think the same source (long forgotten) mentioned Bob Dylan as a familiar example for a 20th Century audience, perhaps still true in the 21st.

This poem was new to me, as was the poet. I read it several times. I concluded that I needed to look at it holistically and thematically rather than by analyzing specific lines and images.

What rings out to me is the overwhelming theme of loss of innocence. The narrator speaks from the perspective of one who is aware of his own mortality and the mortality of us all. It is the human curse of sentience: we are all aware that we are going to die. To me, this theme is so deeply rooted in our collective psyche that one could argue that it can be allegorically traced back to the awareness that humans developed in Eden—or in many other accounts of creation. Children do not yet consciously possess this awareness.

The subtitle of the poem sparks a moral dilemma. It is written “to” a young child not “for” a young child. There is power in that prepositional choice. The narrator is giving the child advice on what to expect as she winds her way through life. So, my question is this: Why burden a child with that knowledge prematurely? Let her cry over leaves and be sad for the moment. Why have her forge links of future sad moments into a Marley necklace? Time enough for the child to come to her own realization.

All that being said, I love the poem. It is powerful yet subtle. It is well-crafted and artfully conveys an inevitable truth of our human condition—a truth that would better serve us if we forgot it and regained our childhood innocence.

Thank you for sharing.

Matt

@timspalding Looks like this poem you selected invoked a lot of astute reading by the members here. I enjoy how each person picked up on different aspects and found a meaning that, generally, we seem to agree upon. I would love to hear your thoughts, when you have some time.

For those of you who are already familiar with Hopkins, are there additional poems of his you would recommend?

One of the most beautiful and more approachable of Hopkins' poems. I too had a Hopkins phase in my twenties, particularly taken with his willingness to invent words. (An attraction of English nonsense poets too, but here going in the opposite direction, a "super" sense if you will.) However, the large portion that theology played in his imagination combined with ever more complicated experimentation with rhyme renders much of his poetry opaque to me, at least without a lot of elaboration.

>13 DebiCates:

The first of his poems I read (possibly the most famous one too): No worst, there is none.

>14 LolaWalser: What a fierce, painful poem. No worst, indeed. I very much appreciated the audio reading and discussion found at the link to poetry foundation that you included. Thank you.

>15 DebiCates:

You're welcome. Perhaps it's worth noting that great depressive poets like Hopkins paradoxically have an invigorating effect on their readers (I don't suppose I'm alone in this?) At any rate, he and others helped me through my own depressed times. I'm not sure how that works. Maybe finding the expression for the worst feelings, even in borrowed words, begins the healing.

For Hopkins himself, however, there doesn't seem to have been such consolation, not in poetry, anyway.

>16 LolaWalser:

I'd never read that one. Thanks.

Okay, here are some thoughts on how I read the poem, interlinear-ly:

Spring and Fall

It's appropriate he uses the word "Fall," not the normal British word, autumn. I think it slips by modern readers, but the topic of the poem is not "death," as we might conceive of it, but the Fall. Or rather that death is the consequence and essence of the Fall.

Margaret, are you grieving

* The poem in miniature. A child cries or complaints, but does not grieve. Or do they?

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

* Rather than just a Hopkins-ian coinage, "Goldengrove" feels like a window into more--the child's name for the place, or a family idiolect.
* "Unleaving" is gorgeous.
* I don't have the vocabulary to express it right, but the line (as with others) has more internal sound patterns than just consonance and assonance would describe. "Over Goldengrove" is 75% of the way to a verbal palindrome, performed in the front of the mouth.

Leaves, like the things of man, you

* "Unleaving / leaves" is nice.
* What will grown-up Margaret grieve? What do we? The "things of man," mostly. Death, loss, pain, abandonment, guilt. But the Christian idea of the Fall is that the whole cosmos is in some sense broken. So it's not just the "things of man." It's not merely that the child grieves the silly thing but will soon grieve the real one; it's that they are both the same thing—a cosmic thing.

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

* I like her youth being described as "fresh." But fresh is also a natural, botanical term. She's the new leaf, witnessing the old, soon to be the old.
* "care for, can you" is delicious.

Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder

* "Ah!" is the kind of word you don't see in poetry now. I note that Natalie Merchant left it out. It wouldn't work in the song.
* Our hearts are colder, as indeed the autumnal scene must be.
* "grows older" is almost a cliche, but "grows" fits with the botanical theme.

By and by, nor spare a sigh

* The "nor" is a surprise. There's an implied negative before, but it's jarring. (See below on nor… nor.)

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

* The w-w, l-l is so typically Hopkins as with "heart heard of, ghost guessed"(1)
* Worlds of wanwood is both a childlike exaggeration and a cosmic one. The pain of the world, of the Fall, is the pain of uncounted individuals, each a world unto themselves.(2)
* "Leafmeal" is a delicious coinage.

And yet you will weep and know why.

* Gorgeous repeated sounds
* The child incongruously "grieving" is now the adult who weeps—it's flipped.

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.

*To put it obviously, to Hopkins, the name is the Fall, which is to say the entrance of death into the world, and font of all misery.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

* Nor… nor… is understandable, but at a slant to normal English. It feels slightly off, poetic, high.
* It's a tangent, but there's a whole blog post about the use of "nor"… "nor"… (rather than "neither"… "nor") in English. The authors call it the "the poetic use of “nor” to mean “neither.” You can find it here. https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2018/07/nor-neither.html I think it misses a critical point. While odd in English, it's normal Latin, where you say nec… nec… or neque… neque…. and translate it as "neither… nor…". Greek too, with οὐδέ / οὐδέ, or μηδέ / μηδέ. I haven't looked at all the examples in the blog post, but I notice the usage is often in classical contexts, and sure enough the one they give: "Nor Bits nor Bridles can his Rage restrain" is not just Dryden, but Dryden translating Virgil, specifically translating neque… neque… in Latin: "ac neque eos iam frena uirum neque uerbera saeua." Why mention this? Because in addition to probably knowing English poetry so well, Hopkins was a Classics professor.

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

* Ghost here is clearly just "spirit," an antique usage, but normal enough. At this point the Church was still referring to the Holy Spirit as the Holy Ghost.
* Implicit contrast between mind and heart, and the inadequacy of words and expression. We try to capture, master and express truth with our mouths and in our minds, but truth is in some way "heard" and guessed first and best.

* The h-h of g-g is so typically Hopkins.
* Merchant adds "ghost had guessed" which works better in the song.
* The Merchant version crescendoes on these lines, which felt off to me once but now appeals to me. The last two lines climb down from somehow, sharpening and simplifying things to the core message, expressed simply.

It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

* The last two lines are deliciously resolving as ring composition, and together.
* Note they both start with "It is"
* Note the end rhyming of "for" and "for"—the sort of move you can only get away with when it feels inevitable and perfect.
* Note the parallel consonance—blight / born, Margaret / mourn.
* "Blight" works because it's botanical. Death and the fall are often spoken of as "corruption," organic decay.

Now, if the religious undertext were to be continued, Hopkins would reverse it. The Fall is a "fortunate fall" (Felix culpa). The tree of Eve is undone by the tree of the Cross. Christ dies, and in dying conquers death. But it doesn't go there. That would be too easy. This poem is just about death. Hopkins writes a two-sided poem—death and life—in "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_of_Gerard_Manley_Hopkins/The_Leaden_Echo_an... . I love that poem, but this is better.

---

1. The contrast between cosmic tenderness and pain reminds me of a passage in Nabokov's "Symbols and Signs":

"She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the in visible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer."

2. Some of the most extreme examples in "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo." ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_of_Gerard_Manley_Hopkins/The_Leaden_Echo_an... )

Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.

I spent a little time investigating a theory—starting by finding the book The Golden Grove by Jeremy Taylor (1855), a book of prayers and other pious things intended for children, in which I searched for leaf:

"Lord, carest Thou not that I perish? Thou that wouldest have all men saved? Thou who wouldest have none to perish? And wilt Thou now shew Thine anger against a worm, against a leaf, against a vapour that vanisheth before Thee? O remember how short my time is, and deliver not my soul into the power of hell."

A reference? Probably not, but noted.

Anyway, it led led me to what the book was named after, Taylor's estate "Golden Grove." And that led me to this page with "Commentary by Ian Lancashire", which has a lot to recommend it. https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/spring-and-fall

"Spring and Fall" is not about the seasons, or even necessarily just about one of the Golden Groves in Wales. The stately Flintshire house rests in a glorious forest of great trees. The Carmarthen place suits the prayer book that Bishop Jeremy Taylor, its owner, published in 1655 and from which Hopkins may have remembered hints at what the poem does concern.

Some passages I like from this:

A little girl named Margaret cries over the lovely golden leaves of the autumn forest, all fallen to the ground; and she asks the speaker why they are shed. Like many children, she gets upset easily when things are not as she would have them and is ever full of questions for explanations. She willfully cries and cries, insisting, the speaker says, on knowing "why" (9). Parents and teachers usually answer these questions patiently, sympathetically. Leaves fall because of the seasons. It is just "Spring and Fall" and the leaves will come back next year, so that there is no reason to cry, is there? This speaker, unlike older people who talk down to children in a well-meaning, comforting way, does not tell her that she cries without cause. He does not bring comfort; he tries not to treat her as a child at all. Although we may not be meant to know who the speaker is, we all do because Hopkins signed his name to the poem. Of course he was a Catholic priest who routinely took confessions and gave absolution, baptized and pronounced the last rites, administered mass and marriage, and above all taught his parishioners about life in the context of God's eternity. Margaret came to the wrong person if she hoped for sympathy. She received a lesson instead.

His use of compound words in "wanwood leafmeal", termed "kennings" in Old English, also harks back to its poetics; and so do words lacking determiners in lines 12-13, "mouth", "mind", "heart", and "ghost." Prosodic effects like these estrange his writing from modern speech and lend it a staccato, urgent energy that goes lacking in much Victorian poetry.

"Though having just one line more than a sonnet, Hopkins' "Spring and Fall" draws on two poetic forms from very different traditions: children's sing-song, and the four-stress Old English alliterating line."

>19 timspalding: This is a lot Tim. I love that the poem led you to the investigation it did.
You did this and I have read your adventure and it has really helped remind me of something I once loved about poetry.

Poetry opens doors.

There's so much I want to say, but I'm all up in my head like Mr Squiggle.

Thank you, much appreciated.

| P.S. Big YES to the passage from Nabokov's - Symbols and Signs "...of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer." Ah!

>19 timspalding: When you said, at the beginning, that you wanted more poetry in your life, I see emphatically what you mean now. Here in your selection you go on a romping literary adventure and, surely, are having a great time. It's a pleasure for those who read along with your journey and investigations.

I was struck by this in the Ian Lancashire commentary, where he states Hopkins' poem has

"...urgent energy that goes lacking in much Victorian poetry"

That hits many nails on the head for me. One of the reasons I enjoy certain poetry so much is that sense of urgency, its economy, in language where selection is essential, not at all casual. Although I rarely attempt anything more than a glancing deconstruction of those attributes, (something you wondrously excel at), I can recognize it, a formal, austere hand that grabs you by the neck.

>19 timspalding: And what a passage this, from Taylor, was! Such sad pleading...

"Lord, carest Thou not that I perish? Thou that wouldest have all men saved? Thou who wouldest have none to perish? And wilt Thou now shew Thine anger against a worm, against a leaf, against a vapour that vanisheth before Thee? O remember how short my time is, and deliver not my soul into the power of hell."

>18 timspalding: I got so much out of "thoughts on how I read the poem, interlinear-ly"

Some tidbits:
"death...the consequence and essence of the Fall." Oh my, of course you are right! Hopkins is not only a man of his time and place, but a Jesuit priest.

"While odd in English, it's normal Latin..." that will always be something I miss, without Latin or Greek in my education, but was certain a standard in any formal education before, say, the 1950s.

The usage of "ghost" as in the older phrase "holy ghost." I never considered how that is not used that way any longer.

And, throughout, you pick up on a botanical metaphor, beginning at the start with leaves. Intriguing. And apt. It spun me off into thoughts how often mankind thinks itself outside nature but, dear dear mankind, you are trapped integrally, fully in it.

Thank you, Tim!

Agreed, poetry more frequently than fiction for me is something I enjoy having a guided tour in appreciating. Probably because I'm more confident and frankly, better equipped to get my own interpretations of fiction than of poetry.

In big part my impetus for joining this group.

Hopkins might be my favorite poet - the “terrible sonnets” are wonderful. I didn’t think he returned to poetry soon after joining the church - I thought the church prevented his writing poetry for quite some time until he was allowed to commemorate the sinking of the Deutschland, but his journals make interesting reading. If anyone is interested, I am pruning my library and I’m sure there are books on Hopkins that I would cheerfully give to anyone interested

>25 bookstopshere: Hey Scott, it's great to have you here. Your offering of your Hopkins books is very generous. In fact, I'm wondering maybe if we shouldn't start a topic on The Poetry Collective just about those sorts of offerings. If you don't object, I'd like to do that, and start with a link to your message. Would that be okay with you?

Would you be interested in signing up to post a poem for us on an upcoming Saturday? The roster is below, just post a comment there on what available date you would like. And any date that I'm signed up for (next is May 30th) I am willing to give to a member, especially a new one.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/374036#8954197

>25 bookstopshere: I also meant to add that I find Hopkins' life one of the most interesting of poets. I haven't studied him or anything, but have watched a few documentaries about his life and work on Youtube. I always end up thinking about him for days. It's rare to encounter a person of such humble conviction. And talent.

Ok with me - I have lots of poetry volumes that I am sending off to good homes. Am a tad busy to sign up for a date to post a verse, but will get to it as I can.