Innocence and Experience

Innocence and Experience What does it mean to “lose” one’s innocence? Some may say innocence is lost when the belief in Santa Claus has vanished or when parents let their children have a sip of their bitterly harsh grape juice. Innocence could be lost along with the loss of pure virginity. That being said, is innocence even something that is lost, or did it even exist in the first place? A baby is in their mother’s womb; a place where they are sheltered from all the horrors of the world. Once the baby is brought out of the warm space that they called home for nine months, they are exposed to this beautiful nightmare. How long after a child is brought into this world will their innocence last? How long will it take for a human being to experience something that causes them to lose all innocence? Innocence is a characteristic of life that is slowly taken away by experience, just like how in Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, Spring and Fall, the cool winds of fall strip the trees of their leaves, leaving them bare for everyone to see. The entirety of the poem is all about innocence and experience and how they interact with each other. The first few lines of the poem say, “Margaret are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?” Margaret is sad that fall has come and blown all the leaves off the trees. She cares just as much about a small issue like leaves falling off trees as she does large problems of man. She is just a child thinking innocent thoughts, but throughout the poem, this simple thought turns into an experience. Later in the poem Hopkins writes,
“Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh.”
Hopkins explains in these lines that as Margaret grows older, she won’t be sad that the trees lost their leaves. She would have had an experience that caused her to lose the innocence she once had as a child. In the last two lines of