Spring and Fall: Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins sj

 To a Young Child

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With you 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 guest:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

The most anthologised and deceptively simple of Hopkins’ poems, I chose it because of the moods within its autumn theme. It was composed spontaneously while the poet, on priestly work in Liverpool, and on September 7, 1880,  was walking back to the city (Hopkins was a great walker!), having said Mass for a family in a country house. An unlikely poem for this poet, because on the whole the signature of a Hopkins poem is its passionate realism. This poem, however, is addressed to a little girl, who is a fiction, as is Goldengrove, which is not a place, but a play-world of the child’s fantasy. In the sing-song rhythm of the first eight lines, Margaret, who is a symbol of the child in us, is addressed. The title of the poem evokes the freshness and directedness of emotion in the ‘springtime’ of life. The falling of leaves within the child’s eden paradise brings her to tears. She is beginning to experience some of the flaws in her natural harmony with creation, and neither does the poet spare her, for with the phrase ‘the things of man,’ he hints at more complicated betrayals within the eden of her life. Using the American ‘Fall’ instead of ‘Autumn’, the play on the word ‘fall’ broods over the poem.

Yet the last six lines introduce a change of rhythm where the poem becomes more jagged and spiky. We feel we are now going to hear some truths. Speaking to Margaret and to all of us, the poet introduces it as a growth in consciousness as in line eight: ‘And yet you will weep and know why’. But this growth only comes at a price. The price is the recognition of and indeed the tears of our own fallenness as adults. This liberating knowledge is of the heart and human spirit (‘ghost’ in Hopkins). And as throughout Hopkins’ poetry, this wound is the place of grace and the basis of our hope. We find the same idea eloquently put in the Bohemian-Austrian poet, Rilke (1875-1926) as in his poem: Autumn:

We are all falling. This hand’s falling too-
all have this falling sickness none withstands.
And yet there’s One whose gently-holding hands
This universal falling can’t fall through.

While Rilke’s religious gift thrusts him toward the ‘nay-sayable’ One, his is a courageous but lonely journey. In Hopkins, however, the Christian, we find shades of Paul’s great text on the Fall of Rom 7:14-25. For the God-ward thrust in Hopkins is simply a trust, a trust that the ‘nay-sayable One’ has spoken, and is actually ‘said’ in the Person of Christ, and that the blight man was born for is no more than a strategy of His healing relationship to us.

Jo O’Donovan rsm
Limerick

Messages to: Jo O’Donovan rsm