Gerard Manley Hopkins.docx

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)Spring and Fallto a young child 1Margaret, are you grieving 2Over Goldengrove unleaving? 3Leaves, like the things of man, you 4With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? 5Ah! as the heart grows older 6It will come to such sights colder 7By & by, nor spare a sigh 8Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; 9And yet you wll weep & know why. 10Now no matter, child, the name: 11Sorrows springs are the same. 12Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed 13What hart hard of, ghst gussed: 14It is the blight man was born for, 15It is Margaret you mourn for.Notes 1 Hopkins wrote this poem as he walked from Lydiate to the train for Liverpool (White). He wrote Robert Bridges that it was a little piece composed since I began this letter Sept. 5, not founded on any real incident. I am not well satisfied with it (Letters, I, 109).2 Goldengrove: capitalized, as a place name. Golden Grove, Carmarthenshire (Wales), is about three hours south of Liverpool, and was the estate of Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), an Anglican bishop who wrote a manual of daily prayers, The Golden Grove (1655). Closer to Hopkins regular home in Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and more appropriate to the theme in Hopkins poem, is the Golden Grove at Llanasa, Flintshire, a great house from the Elizabethan period that rests in a thousand acres of great trees and pastures. unleaving: letting fall its leaves, unleafing. There may be a play on the sense, not departing from (i.e., that Margaret must stay in Goldengrove in its present state).4 fresh: newly experienced, youthful.6 colder: with less emotion.8 wanwood leafmeal: dark forest (Old English wann; possibly our wan, pale and tired), with all its leaves on the ground, piecemeal.11 springs: origins; playing on tears (cf. 9 weep). the same: all one.13 ghst: soul.Commentary by Ian Lancashire(2002/9/9) A little girl named Margaret cries over the lovely golden leaves of the autumn forest, all fallen to the ground; and she asks the speaker why they are shed. Like many children, she gets upset easily when things are not as she would have them and is ever full of questions for explanations. She willfully cries and cries, insisting, the speaker says, on knowing why (9). Parents and teachers usually answer these questions patiently, sympathetically. Leaves fall because of the seasons. It is just Spring and Fall and the leaves will come back next year, so that there is no reason to cry, is there? This speaker, unlike older people who talk down to children in a well-meaning, comforting way, does not tell her that she cries without cause. He does not bring comfort; he tries not to treat her as a child at all. Although we may not be meant to know who the speaker is, we all do because Hopkins signed his name to the poem. Of course he was a Catholic priest who routinely took confessions and gave absolution, baptized and pronounced the last rites, administered mass and marriage, and above all taught his parishioners about life in the context of Gods eternity. Margaret came to the wrong person if she hoped for sympathy. She received a lesson instead. Spring and Fall is not about the seasons, or even necessarily just about one of the Golden Groves in Wales. The stately Flintshire house rests in a glorious forest of great trees. The Carmarthen place suits the prayer book that Bishop Jeremy Taylor, its owner, published in 1655 and from which Hopkins may have remembered hints at what the poem does concern. The Spring of the poems title is the source of all tears, Sorrows springs (11), and that source is the Fall of Man: original sin and the punishments meted out to Adam, Eve, and their descendents for their eating of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Goldengrove unleaving is the world infected with the blight man was born for (14); it is, as John Milton said, paradise lost. All sorrows, whether for leaves or the things of man (3), have their origin in that primal event described in Genesis and, according to the New Testament, paid for by Gods son Jesus at his crucifixion and death. The seasons run parallel to the life and death of every man. They result from the same blanket, divinely ordained curse pronounced on Adam and Eve in Eden by which everything in the human world suffered. Hopkins uses the term blight for its associations with a disease afflicting crops and the natural world for this reason. Hearing Margarets heartfelt grief at the fallen leaves, and taking her plea for an explanation seriously, Hopkins speaker tells her of a calamity that, over time, will inure her to all other losses. It is Margaret, herself cursed, whom she mourns for. All sights, even were they to encompass entire worlds, fade into insignificance in comparison to what humanity intuits but never explicitly verbalizes or even conceptualizes. What hart hard of, ghst gussed, is something felt as an emotion and sensed as a spirit or soul, because the soul, unlike the body, was thought immortal, generated by God from a world very unlike our own. The proper name Margaret means a pearl, which is symbolically the New Testaments pearl of great price, that is, the soul. Margaret grieves because of an intuition that comes naturally to someone named as she is. Though having just one line more than a sonnet, Hopkins Spring and Fall draws on two poetic forms from very different traditions: childrens sing-song, and the four-stress Old English alliterating line. The six double rhymes (1-6, 10-15), of which the second is a weakly-stressed syllable (except at 10-11), give the verse a lilting, singable character, not unlike nursery rhymes. For example, the last couplet, born for and mourn for (14-15), imposes on the somber thought a music found usually in light verse, not ode, elegy, or complaint. The one triplet, at lines 7-9 (which marks a transition between Margarets problem and its explanation), features internal rhymes on sights and sigh, by and sigh, and Though and know, that together enhance this child-like easiness. Simple idioms like can you? (4), the heart grows older (5), By & by (7), and no matter (10) belong to a poem addressed, like any nursery rhyme, to a child (10) who may be crying. Old English prosody builds on a line with two two-stress half-lines of indeterminate length (that is, the number of syllables is not fixed) in which the stressed terms alliterate. Here, stresses in lines 1-2 and 13 fall on g-words, lines 4 and 6 on c-words, lines 8-9 on w-words, lines 7 and 11 on s-words, and so on. This technique influenced Hopkins conception of sprung rhythm and explains why he placed stress marks on some words, such as will in line 9. Note how Hopkins lines have a caesural pause in their middle: this break turns them into paired half-lines. His use of compound words in wanwood leafmeal, termed kennings in Old English, also harks back to its poetics; and so do words lacking determiners in lines 12-13, mouth, mind, heart, and ghost. Prosodic effects like these estrange his writing from modern speech and lend it a staccato, urgent energy that goes lacking in much Victorian poetry. The title Spring and Fall nicely conveys the metrical effects Hopkins achieves in yoking Old English two-stress half-lines with double rhymes ending on weak syllables. Finally, although Hopkins may have had little use for syllable-counting in his theory of sprung rhythm, he clearly employs variations in line-length to good effect here. The poem breaks into two parts, the speakers recognition of Margarets grief at lines 1-8, and his explanation for that sorrow at lines 9-15. The first eight lines consist of four sentences, each with two lines, a couplet, having 7 and then 8 syllables. The pattern is a regular 7, 8, 7, 8, 7, 8, 7, and 8 syllables. Three of these couplets also close with strong terminal punctuation on the second line, the one with 8 syllables. The final seven lines follow a more disordered pattern, with 8, 7, 6, 8, 6, 8, and 8 syllables. This irregularity expresses the strong feelings of the speaker. Note that in every instance the 8-syllable lines convey the tenets that he teaches. Like stressed alliterative verse, line-lengths communicate the drama of thought and feeling in the speakers mind. Hopkins sonnets, alternately the bleakest (No worst, there is none) and most exalting (Gods Grandeur) in English, sometimes give vent to his frustration as a poet whose writings went unpublished and unrecognized in his lifetime. If he remembered Taylors The Golden Grove, the collection of prayers, Spring and Fall may have had a private meaning for Hopkins. The word leaves connotes pages too. The po