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    Current Issue cover of Plough Quarterly Issue: Why We Work
    watercolor painting of yellow leaves
    Articles Books and Culture Poetry

    Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall”

    By Gerard Manley Hopkins and Julian Peters

    April 28, 2020
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    • JL Gerhardt

      I love this poem--"unleaving" is such a powerful word (like so many of Hopkins' inventions). The image of the adult Margaret above the child Margaret, both weeping, is arresting. Thank you!

     

    Margaret are you grieving / Over goldengrove unleaving?

     

    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 a sigh / Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

     

    And yet you will weep and know why. / Now no matter, child the name: / Sorrows springs are the same.

     

    Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

     

    It is the blight man was born for,

     

    It is Margaret you mourn for.
    Contributed By GerardManleyHopkins Gerard Manley Hopkins

    Gerard Manley Hopkins, who in life was considered a failure as both a poet and a priest, posthumously became one of the great poets of the modern era.

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    Contributed By JulianPeters Julian Peters

    Julian Peters is an illustrator and comic book artist living in Montreal, Canada, who focuses on adapting classical poems into graphic art. His work has been exhibited internationally and published in several poetry and graphic art collections.

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