Gerald Manley Hopkins

Gerald Manley Hopkins threw me for a loop. It was very difficult for me to understand several if not all of his works. I read them over and over again trying to grasp just the tiniest sliver of understanding but feel like I never actually got a hold of it…or perhaps I did…as a splinter of pain in my side.

The poem that I feel like I did understand the most would be Spring and Fall. Hopkins wrote about nature and God a lot in his poetry, which was not common for the Victorians. Spring and Fall is a great example of how nature still influenced him in his writing. Hopkins writes of a young child weeping over the falling leaves, “Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving?” (776). Many writers wrote of the seasons and each season was a symbol of the time period in a persons life. Spring was associated with childhood because there is liveliness, joy, color and innocence as the world is being reborn. Winter is often referred to as death because everything is cold, dark, grey and the trees are naked like bare skeletons. When I read this poem these symbolic seasons came into mind. I believe in this poem Spring does represent Margaret’s innocence and childhood and that Fall does represent her coming into knowledge and losing her innocence as she learns about death and mortality. The speaker goes on to explain to the child that,

“Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder…
And yet you will weep and know why…
It is Margaret you mourn for.” (776).

It as if the speaker is explaining that even as she gets older, the leaves falling from the trees will no upset her as much as they did in her childhood but she will still feel sorrow but for a more realistic meaning. She will “know” that she is not weeping for the trees but for herself and the fact that she is not immortality and will soon meet the same fate of the leaves on the trees.