"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.