Spirituality: Spring and Fall
[Under development: 3 June 2005 ]
Understanding life requires acknowledgement of loss and death. In this poem, Gerard Manley Hopkins equates all experience of loss with a pre-figurement of our own death.
· How often do you think about your own death?
· What preparations would you like to make regarding your own death?
Spring and Fall
to a young child
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.
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
