The Classic Poem
Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'Spring and Fall'

Selected By Alvin Pang

'The Classic Poem' is a space for practical criticism of published, non-Singaporean poems which have been quite widely read, or even for revisiting poems are so timeless and classic that pretty much everybody knows them.

Please post your responses in the Forum. After six weeks, the best posts will be compiled into this article.

Spring and Fall

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, líke 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 wíll 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.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Please post your responses in the Forum. After six weeks, the best posts will be compiled into this article.

'The Classic Poem' is a space for practical criticism of published, non-Singaporean poems which have been quite widely read, or even for revisiting poems are so timeless and classic that pretty much everybody knows them.

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