The Full Text of “Spring and Fall”
to a young child
1Márgarét, áre you gríeving
2Over Goldengrove unleaving?
3Leáves like the things of man, you
4With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
5Ah! ás the heart grows older
6It will come to such sights colder
7By and by, nor spare a sigh
8Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
9And yet you wíll weep and know why.
10Now no matter, child, the name:
11Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
12Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
13What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
14It ís the blight man was born for,
15It is Margaret you mourn for.
The Full Text of “Spring and Fall”
to a young child
1Márgarét, áre you gríeving
2Over Goldengrove unleaving?
3Leáves like the things of man, you
4With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
5Ah! ás the heart grows older
6It will come to such sights colder
7By and by, nor spare a sigh
8Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
9And yet you wíll weep and know why.
10Now no matter, child, the name:
11Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
12Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
13What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
14It ís the blight man was born for,
15It is Margaret you mourn for.
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“Spring and Fall” Introduction
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In "Spring and Fall"—one of Gerard Manley Hopkins's best-known and best-loved poems—Margaret, a young girl, grieves over falling autumn leaves as if they were dying friends. A sympathetic, melancholy adult speaker tells her that this won't be the last time she cries about change and death: inescapable loss is the human condition. Like most of Hopkins's poetry, "Spring and Fall" was first published in the posthumous collection Poems (1918).
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“Spring and Fall” Summary
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Margaret, are you mourning Goldengrove's falling leaves? Can you, with your fresh young mind, care for leaves just as much as you care for people and their concerns? Ah, as your heart gets older, it won't be so sensitive to sights like this after a while; you won't sigh even once for whole worlds of fallen, rotten leaves. But you'll still cry, and you'll know why you're crying. Never mind what we think we're crying about: all our sorrows come from the same place. No one could ever say or think the truth that our hearts hear and our souls intuit. It's the curse that every human is born to face: it's you yourself, Margaret, that you're grieving for.
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“Spring and Fall” Themes
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The Inevitability of Loss
“Spring and Fall” observes that coming to terms with death and loss is a central part of life—and a painful one. Tenderly addressing Margaret, a “young child” mourning over falling leaves in autumn, the speaker reflects that “sorrow[]” like this will be with her all her life, just as it is for everyone. Loss, the poem suggests, is the inevitable “blight man was born for,” an unavoidable part of the human condition that everyone alive must struggle with.
Margaret happens to be weeping over falling leaves now, but really, the speaker reflects, she’s crying about something that she’ll cry about her whole life long: the fact that nothing lasts forever. “Sorrow’s springs” (that is, sorrow’s sources) are the same no matter what age one is; all sorrows come from loss, and loss just can’t be avoided.
Even when people aren’t consciously grieving, their “ghost[s]” (or spirits) are still haunted by their awareness that everything passes and death is inevitable. They can always feel what’s coming. Grown people might have gotten past mourning autumn leaves, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have to grapple with the deep sadness of impermanence.
When Margaret cries for the leaves, the speaker reflects, she’s thus really crying about the human condition itself. “It is Margaret you mourn for,” the speaker tells her—words that suggest more than one kind of grief. Margaret’s tears over the leaves are just her first taste of the lifelong pain of change and loss, and she’s thus unwittingly crying about how much she’ll cry in the future. What’s more, she’s literally mourning herself without knowing it: she’ll die one day, just as the leaves do.
Being human, this poem suggests, means coming to terms with the painful fact that nothing lasts forever. Margaret is grieving this for the first time, but certainly not the last.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Lost Innocence and the Sadness of Growing Up
The speaker of “Spring and Fall” marvels that Margaret, a little girl, can mourn so deeply for the falling autumn leaves. “As the heart grows older,” the speaker reflects, “it will come to such sights colder”: adults, in other words, start to grow numb to loss and change. In her “grieving” over a changing landscape and passing time, Margaret is thus also unwittingly mourning her sensitive, receptive, innocent childhood, which will leave her as inevitably as the leaves fall from the trees.
Margaret’s grief over the falling leaves feels especially raw because she’s just a little kid, still not used to the idea that everything changes. Old enough to understand how beautiful the autumn leaves are, she’s also young enough to feel the real pain of losing them.
Adults, the speaker observes, don’t feel ordinary losses like falling leaves anything like as acutely or as poignantly as children do. That's because they’ve had time to get accustomed to the idea that nothing stays the same forever. Children, however, new to the world and seeing everything “fresh,” feel the pain of even the most predictable and natural changes.
As Margaret’s “heart grows older,” the speaker knows, she won’t feel suffer so much over things like falling leaves. But that in itself is a loss! Grieving over the leaves, Margaret is also more alive to their beauty than world-weary adults are. For that matter, by the time Margaret is old enough not to cry when the leaves fall, she’ll also be that much closer to the final “fall” of death herself.
Without knowing it, then, Margaret is crying for herself as much as for the leaves. Childhood comes to an end as inevitably as fall follows spring, and everyone who lives must face the sorrow of growing up.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Spring and Fall”
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Lines 1-4
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?"Spring and Fall" opens on a poignant scene. Margaret—a "young child," as the poem's epigraph reveals—is "grieving" over falling autumn leaves in a wood known only as Goldengrove.
Goldengrove's grave, mysterious name paints a picture of trees blazing with golden autumn color: a kind of every-wood, the archetypal forest in fall. But perhaps Goldengrove is also an enchanted place. Its goldenness might encourage readers to picture the kind of trees one can only find in a fairy tale.
Whatever enchantments Goldengrove has, stopping time isn't among them. Even now, it's "unleaving," losing its leaves. Poor Margaret, crying under the branches, seems to see each fallen leaf as a lost friend.
The adult speaker sympathizes, but they also marvel that Margaret can mourn so deeply and gently ask her:
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?That rhetorical question introduces the heart of the poem. On the one hand, the speaker is amazed that the innocent Margaret, with her "fresh thoughts," can grieve this very ordinary loss. Her youth makes her alive to the fact that this is a loss; she grieves the leaves as if they were the "things of man." (And what are those "things of man"? Human things, certainly—perhaps human sufferings, perhaps living people. This is a line we'll return to.)
On the other hand: the speaker is just as amazed that Margaret can understand this loss. Both young enough to love the leaves and old enough to mourn them, she's on a painful precipice of human experience. This will be a poem about the cost of being alive: the heartbreaking discovery that nothing lasts forever.
Within the sorrow of these first lines, there's a hint of consolation:
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?"Unleaving," at first glance, means "losing its leaves." Stay with the word for a moment, though: there's a pun here. "Unleaving" might also mean "never leaving"—in other words, eternal.
Goldengrove, then, is a place where everything is dying. But it's also a place where something doesn't die:
- Perhaps the "unleaving" thing here is loss itself: death is deathless, everpresent.
- Perhaps, though, Goldengrove itself is also eternal in some way that Margaret can't quite imagine from here on earth. Gold, after all, doesn't tarnish; because of its undimmable gleam, it's an ancient symbol for anything that's both eternal and precious, from the soul to the heavens.
There's a quiet paradox here. Even as Margaret comes to terms with the idea that everything that lives must die, the poem offers a glint of mysterious hope, like the underside of a leaf catching the sun.
These first lines introduce not just the sorrowful Margaret and the gentle speaker, but Hopkins's characteristic sprung rhythm—an easygoing meter in which lines use a standard number of stresses (four, in this poem), but don't stick to any particular flavor of metrical foot, like the iamb or the trochee. That means that, as long as the lines have those four strong beats, they can use any number of unstressed syllables.
A lot of lines written in sprung rhythm could be read in several different ways, so Hopkins sometimes places accents over words like musical notation, showing readers where to lay the stresses. For instance, he specifies that "Márgarét" should be pronounced with three syllables (MAR-ga-ret), rather than two (MAR-gret).
Here's how this all comes together in lines 3-4:
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?This gentle, flexible meter marries the natural sounds of everyday speech to a rhythmic pulse, creating verse that grows as organically as a forest.
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Lines 5-8
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; -
Lines 9-11
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. -
Lines 12-13
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed: -
Lines 14-15
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
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“Spring and Fall” Symbols
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Spring and Fall
In this poem as in many others, the seasons of the year symbolize the seasons of human life. The little girl, Margaret, is still in the "spring" of her youth, but as she mourns over Goldengrove's autumnal falling leaves, she's facing the inevitability of change and death for the first time.
The fall here might also suggest the biblical story of the Fall—that is, the story of the Garden of Eden, in which Adam and Eve are cast out of Paradise after eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That ancient story has often been read as an image of what happens to everyone as they grow up. Just as eating the fruit of the tree makes Adam and Eve self-conscious and ashamed, growing up means leaving babyhood's blissful unselfconsciousness behind.
In both instances, the changing seasons suggest that one can't stay in Paradise forever: nothing in this world is eternal.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Spring and Fall” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Intensely musical alliteration is one of the first things a new reader might notice about Hopkins's poetry. Interweaving, echoing sounds help to give this poignant poem its beauty.
Listen, for example, to the alliteration in this important passage:
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.The concentrated alliteration here makes these lines taste rich as cake—especially when deepened even further with consonance, as in "worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie." Notice the contrasts here, too: the clipped /c/ sounds that describe "colder" adult hearts feel sharp and hard next to the drawn-out, wistful /w/ and /l/ sounds that describe the pale, fallen woods. Besides being just plain euphonious in themselves, these sounds mirror the feelings they describe.
Listen, too, to what happens in the poem's closing lines:
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.- The most important words here all travel in alliterative pairs: "mouth" and "mind," "blight" and "born," and—of course—"Margaret" and "mourn." These coupled sounds subtly suggest inevitability and balance: "Margaret" meets "mourn" as surely as life meets death.
- The effect is even more intense in "heart heard of" and "ghost guessed," where the pairs land right next to each other (and use strong consonance again: "heart heard," "ghost guessed").
- Try reading it aloud: those paired words, which demand careful enunciation, slow the line down considerably, preparing the poem for its unforgettable final lines. Here, alliteration doesn't just create music but paces the poem.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Allusion
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Pun
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Rhetorical Question
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Repetition
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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"Spring and Fall" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Unleaving
- The things of man
- Wanwood
- Leafmeal
- Blight
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Losing its leaves—with a possible pun paradoxically suggesting that Goldengrove is also eternal, never "leaving."
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Spring and Fall”
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Form
Hopkins is famous for his inspired, inventive poetic form. In breaking from more regular patterns of meter and rhyme, he was way ahead of his time. Even the most innovative of his fellow Victorian poets (like Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Robert Browning) were still mostly using rigorous shapes like sonnets and blank verse.
Hopkins, meanwhile, was finding shapes and rhythms of his own. "Spring and Fall" doesn't use a standard form. It's simply written as a single 15-line stanza. Its rhyme scheme, however, divides it into three rough sections: two runs of three couplets separated by a triplet. The emphatic extra line in that triplet delivers a sad warning: "And yet you wíll weep and know why." (Note that the accent over the word "wíll" there means that Hopkins wants readers to stress the word.)
The poem's deceptively simple shape suits its subject matter: death, the plainest and most difficult reality of all.
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Meter
Like many of Hopkins's poems, "Spring and Fall" uses what Hopkins called sprung rhythm, a kind of accentual meter in which lines use a certain number of strong stresses (and usually start with one), but don't stick to any particular metrical foot (like the iamb or the dactyl). The poem's rhythm can thus change a lot depending on how many unstressed syllables each line uses and where those syllables go. This meter was meant to feel both familiar and lyrical, marrying the rhythms of everyday speech to a musical pulse.
Before scanning a couple of lines, take a look at Hopkins's accents. Readers new to Hopkins might notice that he often uses accents over words like musical notation, showing readers where to lay a special stress:
- The accents on "Márgarét," for instance, show that the name should be pronounced with three syllables—Mar-ga-ret—rather than with two—Mar-gret.
- Similarly, the line "Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same" should be read with stresses not just on "Sorrow" and "springs" (which readers might tend to put there anyway) but on "are," making the speaker sound insistent: sorrow's springs are the same.
- The same effect appears in "And yet you wíll weep and know why": you will weep.
Here's how this all comes together in lines 5-6:
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colderBoth of these lines use four strong stresses, but in varied patterns; they have a kind of metrical family resemblance without being twins. The resulting verse has the organic form of a budding twig.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Spring and Fall" uses a deceptively simple rhyme scheme. The poem both starts and ends with a series of three rhymed couplets; one triplet stands out in the middle. Here's how it all comes together:
AABBCCDDDEEFFGG
Now look closer at the sounds of that central triplet:
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.These lines don't just stand out because they use three end rhymes in a row. They also use intense internal rhyme, which gives line 7 in particular a rhythmic, swaying music. Copious alliteration and consonance doesn't hurt, either: the /l/ and /w/ sounds of "worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie" (to pick just one example) make the speaker's words even more striking.
The triplet at the center of the poem, in other words, seems to invite readers' special attention. One reason for that might be that these lines form a hinge between the first and second parts of the poem:
- The first section of the poem deals with Margaret's youthful grief: the speaker sympathizes with (and marvels over) her tears.
- The second part of the poem takes a broader look at loss and change: the speaker observes that Margaret's grief reflects the human condition.
- The central triplet bridges these two ideas. Someday, these emphatic lines suggest, Margaret will get used to some kinds of loss and change. But that doesn't mean she won't feel the pain of grief. As the speaker tells her, "you wíll weep and know why."
The rhyme scheme here thus gently draws the reader's attention to what's at the poem's heart: the inescapable sorrow of being alive, the price of admission.
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“Spring and Fall” Speaker
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All readers can know about this speaker is that they're a melancholy, tender person. Watching a small child mourning the falling leaves, they feel deep sympathy with her, knowing that the grief she feels now is her first taste of a sorrow she'll suffer her whole life long.
Sighing over Margaret's pain, the speaker also mourns the human condition. It's tragic that Margaret will grow up and "come to such sights colder," no longer feeling her feelings so intensely. It's tragic that Margaret will face grief and loss many times over. And it's tragic that Margaret will die one day, like everyone else. Taken all together, the speaker says, this is the "blight man was born for," the great tragedy of being alive.
But the speaker's images of the glorious Goldengrove hint at a gleam of hope beneath all this sorrow. When the speaker says that Goldengrove is "unleaving," the word suggests both that Goldengrove is losing its leaves and that it might be eternal, un-leaving. Perhaps, the speaker subtly suggests, there is some lasting beauty in the world—or at least beyond it.
Both the melancholy and the quiet paradoxical hope here feel a lot like Hopkins's own. A devout Catholic and a Jesuit priest, Hopkins believed that the beauty of nature spoke of an eternal, loving, joyful God; he also suffered from deep depressions, times when he felt as if God could no longer hear him.
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“Spring and Fall” Setting
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"Spring and Fall" is set in two places at once: a mysterious wood called "Goldengrove" and the whole world.
Goldengrove isn't a real place, but an imagined every-forest in fall. Its name suggests that it's at the height of its autumnal glory when Margaret weeps over its falling leaves. This grove's goldenness also paradoxically suggests deep, eternal beauty, even hinting at something like Paradise or Eden: gold, after all, is precious in part because it doesn't tarnish or fade, and it's a common symbol for the soul, Heaven, and eternity. Mourning for Goldengrove, Margaret might thus also be mourning for the very idea of something permanent and perfect.
What Margaret faces in Goldengrove—the inevitability of loss and change—is also, as the speaker observes, the human condition. Whenever and wherever a person is born and grows up, they'll have to deal with "Goldengrove unleaving," with beautiful, beloved things changing, fading, and dying.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Spring and Fall”
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Literary Context
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a poet of deep and ecstatic faith. Born into a Protestant family, he converted to Roman Catholicism as an Oxford undergraduate. Much to his parents' horror, he later became a Jesuit priest. Though he'd always loved writing poetry, he burned many of his early works upon his ordination, feeling that he should turn away from art to devote himself fully to God. His superiors, however, wisely encouraged him to see his writing as a means of worship. The resultant body of sensuous, poignant poetry reflects Hopkins's fervent belief that God suffuses nature.
In some ways, Hopkins was a poet of his time. His sad nostalgia for a pre-industrial England (and horror at humanity's exploitative relationship to nature) is also evident in the work of other Victorian poets—for example, Christina Rossetti (whom Hopkins befriended) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson—as well as in the work of novelists like Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.
But in other ways, Hopkins's poetry seems to both anticipate the future and connect to the deeper past:
- Hopkins's innovative style, with its freewheeling sprung rhythm and its richly interwoven sounds, is often seen as a precursor of the modernist free verse that would arise in the early 20th century.
- Meanwhile, Hopkins's fervent, religious love of nature hearkens back to both the pantheistic Romantics of the early 19th century (like Wordsworth) and the passionately Christian Metaphysical poets of the 17th century (like Herbert).
Perhaps critics are particularly inclined to think of Hopkins as a proto-modernist because the bulk of his work wasn't published until 1918, when Hopkins's friend (and fellow poet) Robert Bridges released the posthumous collection Poems. This book would deeply influence writers in the 20th century and beyond, from W.H. Auden to Dylan Thomas to T.S. Eliot.
Historical Context
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote this poem in 1880, when he was only in his mid-30s. However, death might already have been much on his mind: he was often in bad health, and he would die of typhoid fever nine years later at the age of 44.
Always aware of his own mortality, Hopkins also deeply felt a melancholy nostalgia that influenced many of his fellow Victorian poets. England toward the end of the 19th century was in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution, a period of rapid technological advancement in both manufacturing and transportation. Of the many dramatic changes this era brought about in British society—a decline in rural populations, a rumble of socialist protest—most pressing for Hopkins was the harm to nature: exploitative mining and logging, air and water pollution from factories, and the expansion of urban and suburban spaces into what was once countryside.
Many Victorian artists and writers (and people from all walks of life, for that matter) viewed the loss of the countryside with alarm and despair. For Hopkins, a pious Jesuit priest who saw the natural world as a manifestation of the divine, the impact of industrialization on nature was particularly painful. This poem's wistful longing for times past—especially times past in an Edenic wood—fits into a whole late Victorian mood.
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More “Spring and Fall” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Hopkins's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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Hopkins's Legacy — Learn more about Hopkins (and his many enthusiasts) at the Official Gerard Manley Hopkins Website.
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More Hopkins Resources — Visit the Victorian Web for a wealth of readings on Hopkins.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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