Gore Vidal was on Tavis Smiley the other night. He was as sharp and funny as always, especially on matters political and historical. True to his stage in life, though, a good chunk of the conversation danced with the notion—no, not the notion, the fact—of mortality. At one point Vidal quoted the last two lines of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He mischaracterized the context (saying the poem had to do with a child who had died), but he can certainly be forgiven for that. I happened to notice because the poem made a big impression on me many years ago—it’s the first four lines that periodically float into my mind (along with the last and the tail end of the penultimate). It being fall here in the northern hemisphere, the words came unbidden once again, even before I saw the autumnal Vidal on TV.
Spring and Fall:
to a young child
Márgarét, áre you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh, ás 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:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
The accent marks have to do with Hopkins’s concept of “sprung rhythm.” I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. But you don’t need to understand sprung rhythm to love his poems.
