Robin Gropp | Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring and Fall"

The Hopkins Sketch based on a Woodblock by Robert F. McGovern

Spring and Fall

to 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.

Hopkins seems to gently chide the child for crying over the leaves falling from beloved trees. Leaving her favorite spot will be inevitable as winter comes. He compares this apparently childish grief to the important “things of man.” Later in life she won’t spare a sigh even for whole decaying forests.

But she persists, and he doesn’t dismiss her grief after all. He takes up her question of why. He tells her that her tears connect her with all humanity, that we all share one sorrow. She will not have said it aloud with her mouth or thought it clearly, but her heart knows, and her soul, touched by the Holy Ghost, has guessed. The falling leaves are merely her entry point into sadness. She is facing the knowledge that things are not as they ought to be, that she herself is not as she ought to be, and is not where she ought to be. The unleaving of Goldengrove has brought Margaret face to face with the original leaving, our common exile from the garden, the Fall.

Trees losing their leaves is hardly trivial; it doesn’t happen in paradise. Ezekiel sees in a vision trees whose leaves do not wither, and the psalmist sees the same thing in the courts of God (Ezekiel 47.12 and Psalm 92:12-14). A passage often associated with this poem is Job 5.6-7: For affliction does not come from the dust, nor does trouble sprout from the ground, but man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Thus even Job’s friend Eliphaz, not the most reliable source, sees that leaves aren’t the source of our affliction.