Anja
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- Joined
- May 2, 2008
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Yes, the title is a bit of a hook.
Some of you are familiar with Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet, who wrote wonderfully complicated and vivid poetry toward the end of the Nineteenth Century.
He was a Jesuit who suffered from depression in an era which had little to offer from a medical perspective for those so afflicted.
I imagine he used his creative power to express and deal with his emotional pain.
His poetry was published posthumously in 1918.
As someone who faces the bugaboo of Seasonal Affective Disorder in Autumn, I have grown to appreciate this poem. And every year the clever wording and subtleties grow more rich.
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:
Sorrows 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 1981
Do you have favorite poetry which evokes the loss of summer's gifts?
Some of you are familiar with Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet, who wrote wonderfully complicated and vivid poetry toward the end of the Nineteenth Century.
He was a Jesuit who suffered from depression in an era which had little to offer from a medical perspective for those so afflicted.
I imagine he used his creative power to express and deal with his emotional pain.
His poetry was published posthumously in 1918.
As someone who faces the bugaboo of Seasonal Affective Disorder in Autumn, I have grown to appreciate this poem. And every year the clever wording and subtleties grow more rich.
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:
Sorrows 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 1981
Do you have favorite poetry which evokes the loss of summer's gifts?