The poem
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.
"To a Young Child" by Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of those poems in between language and music which lends itself to memorization. Unwittingly, I can repeat this poem as I can Yeats' "Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer..."
Hopkins' poem, packed with consonance and assonance, is close to language as music or as food. It pours out like a river as it is spoken with its sad message about the mortality at autumn of a grove of trees which the young may dwell on and the older tune out.
I have always loved this poem. We had a wonderful English teacher at my convent school in Devon in the late 1950s and she encouraged us to learn poems by heart including a large number of Hopkins' poems. Perhaps it spoke to me because the child has the same name as me, but I think I liked its autumnal quality ' though worlds of wanwood leaf meal lie ...' I often quote it to myself when looking at the fallen leaves in autumn and somehow I find it very consoling at difficult points in my life .
This is one of Hopkin's most obvious use of sprung rhthym...good stuff!
Isn't this by Wordsworth?
I think that this poem is very deep. i think that it is sad in a way. i love this poem cause it makes me think of a death of a loved one and gets me thinking that life is short and you have to live it up and what more to live it up to than to Jesus Christ. he is my Lord and savior. i love God and want to serve him and this poem just gets me thinking of the life he gave us to serve him.