Spring and Fall

The Poet Gerald Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit Priest. The Poem was written in 1880.He was an English man. He was a 19th century Poet. He got Fame after his death. According to Poet Spring is a sign of fresh life or new birth and Fall means biblical fall of man from grace which led to his mortality.

In “Spring and Fall," Hopkins explains to a child that we all age and die. That Margaret, like all of us, must deal with this fact and not let the knowledge of it hold her back from life. This is a message that almost everyone needs to hear sometime in their lives.

The poem leads into a young girl who is saddened by the winter's approach and the symbolic death of the forest. She doesn't know it intentionally, but in her heart she knows that all things will end and the coming of winter foreshadows her own mortality. She is told that as she ages, it won't bother her even though she may see an infinity of leaves as said in line six "It will come to such sights colder”. The eighth line is perhaps one of the most beautiful in all of Hopkins's work: The word "worlds" suggests a devastation and decline that spreads without end, well beyond the bounds of the little "Goldengrove" that seems so vast and significant to a child's perception. Loss is basic to the human experience, and it is absolute and all-consuming. "Wanwood" carries the suggestion of pallor and sickness in the word "wan," and also provides a nice description of the fading colors of the earth as winter dormancy approaches. The word "leafmeal," which Hopkins coined by analogy with "piecemeal," expresses with poignancy the sense of wholesale havoc with which the sight of scattered fallen leaves might strike a sophisticated and sensitive mind. But line ten is contradictory in saying "And yet you will weep and know why." Which I must take to mean that as Margaret nears her end, she will be saddened by everything that has been, and ever will be lost to time. Eventually she is told that people are born to die,