Recent travels

A favourite seasonal poem!!

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Spring and Fall
to 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 wíll weep & know why.
10Now no matter, child, the name:
11Sorrow's springs are the same.
12Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
13What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
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.