Gerard Manley Hopkins
THE TEXT
To a young child
Margaret, are you grieving[1]
Over Goldengrove[2] unleaving[3]?
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[4] a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood[5] leafmeal[6] lie;
And yet you will weep 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[7] man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Margaret, are you grieving[1]
Over Goldengrove[2] unleaving[3]?
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[4] a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood[5] leafmeal[6] lie;
And yet you will weep 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[7] man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
[2] Goldengrove: A
place whose name suggests an idyllic play-world, orchard
ABOUT THE
WRITER
Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844-1889) in an English poet, whose work expresses an intense response to the
natural world, and innovations in technique produced an intricately woven
tapestry of language that embodied this response.
Hopkins was born in
Strartford, Essex (near London). He was educated at Balliol College, University
of Oxford, where in 1866 he converted to Roman Catholicism. Upon entering the
Jesuit order two years later, he destroyed the poetry he had already written.
Between 1874 and 1877 as a student of theology in northern Wales, Hopkins
learned Welsh; inspired by the language and by its poetry, he began to write
again (but only after his superiors in the church encouraged him to do so). One
of his initial efforts was "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (1875).
This long religious poem, about the martyrdom of a group of shipwrecked German
nuns, evinces the first use of techniques perfected by Hopkins in later works
such as "The Windhover," "Pied Beauty," "Duns Scotus'
Oxford," and "Henry Purcell." These lyrics are attempts to
capture the uniqueness-or inscape, as
Hopkins termed it-of natural objects, by the use of internal rhyme,
alliteration, and compound metaphor and by the use of "sprung
rhythm." It seems abrupt in contrast to the running rhythm typical of the
poetry of his time, approximates the stresses of natural speech. It differs
from the conventional system of regular number of stressed and unstressed
syllables per foot.
In 1877 Hopkins was
ordained in the Jesuit order and served as a parish priest and teacher in
England and Scotland before becoming a professor of Greek at University
College, Dublin, Ireland, in 1884. His unhappy years in Ireland, shadowed by
overwork and ill heath, produced a series of poems known as the "terrible
sonnets," with a few exceptions, Hopkins's poems were not published during
his lifetime; they were read only by friends and fellow poets. After his death
his friend the poet laureate Robert Bridges anthologized a selection of
Hopkins's work. The collected editions was published in 1917; a second,
complete, edition appeared in 1930, whereupon his work received due recognition
and established its influence on 20th-century English poetry.
SUMMARY
AND ANALYSIS OF THE POEM
In developing a summary of Hopkins's poem, profound (Showing intellectual penetration or emotional depth) observations reveal themselves. The speaker
of the poem, presumably Hopkins, is interacting with a young child, Margaret,
who is crying because of the shedding (throwing) of the leaves. The speaker
addresses Margaret and says that she is now grieving over the falling of leaves
at Goldengrove and the turning of seasons. He further adds; she may not now be
able to understand or name the source of her grief. But, when she gets older,
though, and learns more of the world, she will become less sensitive to
external things and more aware of the true loss in human life-the loss of
oneself. He also says that crying over the fallen leaves means something else:
it shows that Margaret is starting to think about mortality and, yes, her own
eventual death. So, in this sense this poem is about death, addressed to a
young child.
This short poem speaks articulately (eloquently) of the human condition.
The true tragedy, according to Hopkins, is self-estrangement (the feeling of
being alienated from other people) and, therefore, estrangement from God, who
is the source of the self. The speaker asks the young child, if she is feeling
sad about the leaves falling off of the trees in a forest he calls
"Goldengrove." Goldengrove has a very magical, fairyland kind
of sound to it. And the repeated "g" sound in the name also creates
alliteration. Hopkins points out that at this moment in Margaret's life, such
events cause her to feel pain. However, such a condition is going to
change over time: "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." Hopkins suggests that Margaret's change over time will move
from a mourning of the specific to a more universal condition of sadness and
pain: "It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn
for." The poem is one where Margaret is forced to confront her own
mortality. Hopkins suggests that even at the youngest of ages, such an
experience causes pain that moves the individual to understand the universal
condition of hurt intrinsic (belonging to a thing by its very nature) to
what it means to be human.
This poem has a lyrical rhythm appropriate for an address to a child. Hopkins's
idea of addressing this poem "to a young child" is particularly
striking. He merges the experience of the child with the larger context of the
human predicament. He is able to take a child's experience and merge it
into a condition that displays the pain and frustration of being a human being.
Like Margaret, we are born into a world where we find love and experience that
which gives us pleasure. Like Margaret, we eventually confront the
realization that such experiences are transient and not permanent.
Finally, like Margaret, we mourn for our own condition of being, our own
reality in which pain is the only constant. Hopkins does not embrace the
idea that childhood is a permanent state of blissful happiness. Rather,
Hopkins shows childhood to be a smaller version of the human experience that
underscores the world and our place in it. This is profound in how it
speaks to the "spring and fall" of the human experience, amounting to
a study of life and death.
Hopkins has made a profound (of the greatest intensity; complete)
observation in the connection between the natural world and that of human
being. Hopkins sees the pain inherent to the life cycle present in both.
Human beings can learn much from the natural world. The
demonstration of life and death is something paralleled in the human
experience. To understand and acknowledge this is profound. It is
for this reason that when Margaret weeps for herself at the end of poem, it is
an understanding that the world is no different than the leaves of the trees
for whom she initially weeps. It means that to be human is
reflective of the natural world, showing that despite the trappings (fixings)
of mortality, we are no different than any other element that lives and dies in
nature. Likewise, Hopkins’s choice of the American word “fall” rather than the
British “autumn” is deliberate; it links the idea of autumnal decline or decay
with the biblical Fall of man from grace.
Hopkins uses the
understanding of a child to explain how we all feel as we deal with death in
our own way. He shows that even if we do not understand the death, we perceive,
as Margaret has no name for this event, we understand it is our very spirit. He
warps this all up with a deep reflection on man's mortality. He reasons that
the very pain that Margaret feels is the remorse and grief she has for mankind,
including herself, who must inevitably pass away from this world just like the
leaves.
The narrator in the poem
does nothing to soothe the young girl, instead choosing to relate to her and
understand her youthful interpretation of the events unfolding before her eyes.
He recognizes Margaret's innocence and takes an interest in how the child is
taking her first step towards maturity, whether that maturity is really
beneficial or not.
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