Mon poeme préferé en anglais

I had planned to post a lot of poems this month, and here the month is half over and I’ve only done one. I’ll try to do more, I guess. Since poems in French don’t seem to go over, here is what I would call (only if pressed, of course) my favorite poem in English.

Spring and Fall: To a young child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as 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 will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.


I must have read (or recited, mostly to myself) this poem hundreds of times, yet it never fails to affect me. I find it hard to talk about for that very reason, as I do favorites in other genres, say Joyce’s “The Dead” or Jules Bastien-Lepage’s painting of Joan of Arc, because analysis requires a certain emotional remove that I’m unwilling to grant. I do love many of the structural elements of the poem. Alliteration can be hard to pull off without seeming cheesy or overbearing, but when done well, as here, it is effective and affecting. I love the limpidity of the words Hopkins invents; where we need Lewis Carroll to tell us that “slithy”is a portmanteau meaning “lithe” and “slimy”, we know instantly what “unleaving” is and how it leaves the landscape “leafmeal”, even though we’ve never encountered these words before. Mostly what I love, though, is the mood the poem engenders, the mix of beauty and sadness. When I was a young child, fall was my favorite season, both because of its incandescent beauty and because of the nebulous sadness that I, like Margaret, felt. Now that I’m an adult and privy to the insight that Hopkins delicately yet shatteringly encapsulates in the final line, now that I am in the late summer and no longer the spring of my life, it’s still my favorite season. And even though the sadness is more concrete, even though I do “come to such sights colder”, there is still that nebulousness at the edges--which is really just our instinctive realization that sic transit gloria mundi--that invests the golden beauty of fall with greater poignancy.