Spring and Fall, to a Young Child -- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Guest poem sent in by Kamal Janardhan

(Poem #59) Spring and Fall, to a Young Child 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: Sorrow's 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. -- Gerard Manley Hopkins

A bit about this poem, it takes a few readings to truly "get" it.  About a
little girl who weeps for the leaves that die in fall.  Hopkins language
here is a lot less compressed than most of his other works and hence in
being less ornate it ends up being startlingly elegant.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SNIPPETS

  Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the great unsung poets, virtually unknown
  in his lifetime. We have his poetry today only because it was collected
  and published by his friends after his death. It has some of the obsessive
  ornateness and sentimentality of the Victorians, but also a startling
  musicality which is ahead of its time and ours.

  Hopkins began his adult life, like many others of his time and
  middle-class background, as an earnest student at Oxford, concerned with
  the minutest details of religious practice. Like many others, Hopkins
  wound up "swimming the Tiber", that is, going from the Church of England
  to the Church of Rome: and, like many others, he was received there by
  John Henry Newman. The feelings of the converts' families are exemplified
  by a Mrs. Arnold, who wrote to Newman, "Sir, you have now for the second
  time been the cause of my husband's becoming a member of the Church of
  Rome and from the bottom of my heart I curse you for it." Not content with
  this, she also threw a brick through the window of the church where her
  husband was being received. Hopkins died in Dublin in 1889, aged 44. The
  first collection of his poetry was published in 1918.

Kamal