Spring and Fall

I first came across “Spring and Fall”—as I did a similar poem, Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Say”—through two teen movies of the 1980’s. The Frost poem was featured in Copola’s adaptation of the popular S.E. Hinton young adult novel, The Outsiders, and Hopkins’ in Vision Quest, a forgettable movie about a young man searching to find himself by taking on the unbeatable state champion in a wrestling match. (Our hero beats him!) In both films, the themes of the pains and triumphs of growing up are presented in familiar formulas, and the poems lend a sense of gravity to that theme. In any case, lots of my friends in high school, who never would have read poetry otherwise, knew these poems and could recognize them, having heard them in a movie. (The same can be said of my generation in terms of another Victorian poem in our reading, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” recited in class memorably by Alfalfa in one of the “Our Gang” comedies.) That said, hearing these poems in contexts outside of an academic setting really made them stick with me, and I’d like to use this paper as an opportunity to examine precisely what lends “Spring and Fall” in particular its haunting power.

Perhaps Hopkins has great force for me on a personal level because he was the first poet I studied in my freshman English seminar, where my instructor, a woman from Wales, read selections of “The Wreck of the Deutchland” out loud. The line “Warm laid grave of a womb-life grey” still lilts in my memory. The effect of this line, the smoothness, derived from the soft consonants “w,” “m,” “b,” “l,” etc., combined with the long vowel sounds in “womb,” “grey,” and “grave,” leave me with the feeling of what it must sound like to be floating—and dying—under water. T...

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...dressed by the poet directly.

Finally, and returning to sound and rhythm issues, “Margaret” has two rhythmic constructions in the poem. Hopkins insists on a particular rhythm in the first line where the name has accents over the first and third syllables, forcing the pronunciation of all three syllables: “Mar-ga-ret.” However, at the end of the poem, Hopkins does not place these stress marks over the name, inviting the same kind of falling away we hear in at the end of the line, with the word “for.” I would argue that the only stresses in the final line are found on the first syllable in Margaret and the word “mourn.” As a person in the world, as a young person, as an addressee of a poem, and even as a sound “Margaret” falls. Intellectually, I can come to terms of the message of this poem, but it’s the sounds and rhythms of Margaret’s fall that truly chill.