Today’s Poem: Spring and Fall

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s theological realism

Bruno Moras (1883–1939), Autumnal forest landscape with water, n.d. (Wikimedia Commons)

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Spring and Fall 

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.
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By 1880, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), three years a Jesuit priest, had produced one great burst of major poems. It was in 1877, in the months leading to his priestly ordination, that he had experienced the outpouring of such poems as “The Windhover” and “God’s Grandeur.” Ahead lay the dark landscape of the “Terrible Sonnets,” written sometime after his arrival at his final, lonely post at University College, Dublin, in 1884. . 

Today’s Poem, written in 1880, stands between those two groups of poems: the confident surge of 1877, the crisis of the “Terrible Sonnets,” which he was writing in 1885 and 1886. Like those earlier works,“Spring and Fall” is an especially well-known and well-loved poem. Despite the minor-key elegiac tone, its more straightforward syntax reads less knottily than that of “The Windhover,” for example. Its sentiments, too — explaining the endings of things to a child who perhaps doesn’t remember that the leaves fell last year — seem straightforward. We might understand this poem as Hopkins For Beginners. And yet, as is so often the case when we think we know what’s going on, the situation is more complicated than that. 

First, of course, there’s the formal situation. What actually is going on with this poem’s meter? It’s a question we might ask, in fact, of any Hopkins poem from 1875’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland” forward. How to understand Hopkins’s “sprung rhythm” is an argument as old as his own explanation of that meter, in the “Author’s Preface” to the 1918 edition of his poems, edited by his friend Robert Bridges. The oversimplified explanation of sprung rhythm is that its foot begins, always, with a stressed syllable, which may be accompanied by any number of unstressed syllables — generally from one to four, though it’s hard to imagine that many unstressed syllables in a row.  

“Sprung rhythm is the most natural of things,” Hopkins announced in his “Preface,” and yet, as Cambridge University’s Michael D. Hurley has noted, “Hopkins’s prosody is unique in the degree to which metricians disagree about its fundamental structure.” Marshall McLuhan, Hopkins’s great mid-twentieth-century reader and champion, opens his 1944 essay “The Analogical Mirrors” by declaring the poet’s prosodic theory “irrelevant,” which is frankly a not-untempting way to think about it. 

But before we descend any further into these weeds (and long live them), let’s pull ourselves out and back to the poem itself. What can we discover simply by reading it, guided by Hopkins’s diacritic marks indicating the fall of stresses? Among other things, we might realize that — if Hopkins is to be trusted here, and why wouldn’t he be? — we’ve been hearing and reading the poem all wrong. 

Over the decades that I’ve known this poem, I’ve been hearing the opening couplet as trimeter. The first line I naturally hear as three feet: a dactyl and two trochees. Márgaret, áre you gríeving. That sets me up to hear the second line roughly as an anapest, two iambs, and a dangling unstressed half-foot at the end, to make the feminine rhyme. 

But that is not how Hopkins understood his meter. He heard, or imposed, an additional stress on the last syllable of the child’s name, so that the line as he intended it sounds more like an Old English four-stress line, with the accents falling on the alliterative r: Márgarét, áre you gríeving. This sets us up to hear, far more straightforwardly, the trochaic tetrameter of the second line. Remembering, too, that each line opens on a stressed syllable — even if, left to your own devices, you wouldn’t have read it that way — reinforces a more regular sense of the meter as tetrameter throughout. 

Originally, in manuscript form, these poems were far more marked with a system of diacritic symbols to guide the reader. Here, after the first line, marks generally appear to signal when one stressed syllable occurs in direct juxtaposition with another, as in line 11, which we also might be tempted to read as trimeter, but which like the first line seems to fall into an alliterative Old English pattern: Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. In short, what we might think of as the varied music of the lines isn’t nearly as varied as we think. What music we feel we hear is at odds with Hopkins’s own hearing. This is one locus of disorientation in the poem. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins, sometime before 1889 (Wikimedia Commons)

If the meter is unsettling, so too is the poem’s trajectory of meaning. As compassionate as its voice may sound to us, seeming to enter with Margaret into her mourning for the fallen leaves, what that voice actually does is dismantle and recast Margaret’s fellow-feeling for those lost leaves. It does so in so gentle a manner that we barely register the uncomfortable theological realism that the poem superimposes on the child’s feeling. But that uncomfortable theological realism is where the poem is going. 

Hopkins is often grouped with the Romantics as a nature poet. This view of Hopkins, while not wholly inaccurate, ignores the fundamental distinction between Romanticism and sacramentality. Hopkins was not a sentimentalist about nature, including human nature. He did not believe, with Wordsworth, that the “dearest freshness deep down things” was a divine property inherent in nature itself, but an expression, instead, of the objective reality of a transcendent God’s immanent presence in his creation. He also did not believe, with the early Coleridge, in childhood as a prelapsarian stage of human development. He would have felt the insufficiency of Romantic modes of thinking and talking about human beings in relation to the natural world.

“Spring and Fall” tests the depths of Romantic sentiment against the hard bottom of an essential belief in, on the one hand, the goodness of the created order and, on the other hand, the reality of original sin. The speaker begins by observing the child’s tears, ostensibly for the fallen leaves, as though the leaves were possessed, themselves, of some human personality whose death it would be proper to grieve. It’s a moment that in 1798, in the hands of Coleridge, might have devolved into a meditation on the perfection of the child’s connection to the natural world, the untouched purity of her being recalling that of his own child in “Frost at Midnight.” The Hopkins of “God’s Grandeur” might almost view the child, with her “fresh thoughts,” as part of that “dearest freshness,” not yet defiled by “man’s smudge.” Yet he doesn’t. 

“Spring and Fall” is not a Coleridge poem, or even a Romantic one. Hopkins consciously shakes off those immediate forerunners, but to do so he draws on a far more ancient influence. His notebooks of the period suggest that the source for this poem is a 14th-century “lullai” carol, which begins with a child weeping and not knowing why, waiting to be told what her true grief is. 

In remaking the medieval carol, with its catechesis on original sin, Hopkins the post-Romantic Catholic has his speaker first interrogate the weeping child’s empathy for the natural world, asking convolutedly, “Leaves like the things of man, you / With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?” As she grows older, he tells her, she will understand the true sorrow of the world, and her own true sorrow, which she does not understand now. 

The tragedy of the woods, which in his marvelous phrase “lie” in “wanwood leafmeal,” will pale before the real tragedy it analogizes: not the autumn but the Fall, that brings the blight and sorrow of mortality to the whole creation — and to Margaret, innocent only as long as her unknowing lasts, the child who stands weeping for the trees. 

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