Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove[D1] unleaving[D2] ? [D3]
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts [D4] care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder [D5]
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep 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.
This poem written in
1880 opens with a rhetorical question to a child called Margaret: “Margaret,
are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?” “Goldengrove,” an idyllic place
she may have frequented, is shedding leaves as winter approaches. And the
child, with her “fresh thoughts,” feels deeply for the leaves that are falling
as much as for “the things of man.” Margret, the child’s response is
spontaneous. The speaker says that with the passage of time Margret’s thinking
would change - later whole “worlds” of forest will lie rotting like “leafmeal”
[piecemeal] without Margaret being overly disturbed. Margret, who by then will
have become an adult, will weep as an adult, too, but for different reasons. Moreover,
she is aware of the reason why she is crying. The source of this knowing
sadness will be the same as that of her grief as a child at seeing leaves
falling —for “sorrow’s springs are the same.” Unconsciously, Margaret is
already mourning her own mortality.
This poem has a child-friendly lyrical rhythm. The lines
form couplets. The first eight lines have a sing-song effect; however, the last
seven sound more serious. The rhymed triplet in the middle of the poem creates
a pivot for this change. Hopkins incorporates pauses (after “Margaret” in the
first line and “Leaves” in the third), as musical rests. In “will weep” and “ghost
guessed”, however, he lets the stresses stand together for emphasis. Moreover,
the alliteration slows the rhythm at the most dramatic points in the poem.
Margaret, with her freshness, innocence, and directness
of emotion of childhood, is a personification of the springtime. Hopkins’s use
of the American English word “fall[D6] ” points not
only to the decline that comes with the Autumn but also to the Biblical Fall
which is considered to be the reason for human mortality and suffering. In
contrast, childhood comes close to the Edenic state in which man existed before
the Fall. Margaret lives in harmony with nature and it allows her to relate to “Goldengrove”
with the same fellow feeling she might bear for “the things of man.”
Margaret encounters death and decay in the form of falling
leaves and mourns for them – in retrospect, she is mourning for her own
mortality, unconsciously. Margaret
has already reached a level of maturity – and knowledge, as Eve in the Garden
of Eden found out, brings pain. As Margret grows older she will continue
to experience grief, but she will be conscious of the real reason for her grief
- “you will weep, and know why.” Moreover, the cause of her grief would not be
inanimate natural objects. In fact, she would not “spare a sigh, / Though
worlds of wanwoodleafmeal lie.” The word “worlds” suggests an epic proportioned
devastation. The term “wanwood” suggests paleness and sickness as well as the
fading colors of the earth as winter approaches. The word “leafmeal,”, a term Hopkins
had coined by analogy with “piecemeal”, calls to mind vast forests fell, probably
by human hand.
In the final movement of the poem,
Hopkins identifies the cause of the sorrow Margaret feels and he assures us
that she would continue to feel grief, albeit in different ways. The statement
in line 11 that “Sorrow’s springs are the same” suggests that
Margaret represents a stage in life all people go through in coming to
understand mortality and loss. What is significant about this stage is that
while the “mouth” and the mind cannot articulate it, nonetheless, a germ of an
understanding materializes. It is a whisper to the heart, something “guessed”
at by the “ghost”—a purely instinctive insight of the fact that all our sadness
points back to our suffering of losses, and ultimately to our mortality.
Though the narrator is sympathetic, he does not try to
comfort Margret. In fact, his reflections are not really addressed to her as
they are beyond her level of understanding. According to a reputed critic, “Her way
of confronting loss is emotional and vague; his is philosophical, poetical, and
generalizing, and we see that this is his more mature—and “colder”—way of
likewise mourning for his own mortality.”
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