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| Photo courtesy of Micha Sankowski of Warsaw, Poland and sxc.hu |
Wrestling tournaments and minor disasters have temporarily delayed my poems-by-heart project. So I've decided to shift to one a week, reciting all I've learned so far every day to review. The first poem I learned was this one, an old favorite by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I knew it fairly well already...
Spring and Fall
to a young child
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! 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 wíll 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.
I found this one quite easy to memorize aside from the compression of "Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed." And the way that I managed that was to remember to move from "springs" to "mouth" (as of a spring.) Then I had a little trouble wanting to swap "mind" and "heart," but alliteration is a great help there, as "mouth" and "mind" are bracketed together by sound, as well as "heart heard."
There are some things I like especially well about this poem: the strong, sonnet-like ending, the Anglo-Saxon influence on alliterative line structure and words that resemble kennings (wanwood, leafmeal, Goldengrove); the constriction and knottiness of syntax that comes at the same time that revelation approaches; the many meanings circling spring/springs and leaving/leaves. I like the way that the poem questions and doubts language, showing us that the word death, say, doesn't matter because all sorrows have the same springs--in fact, heart and spirit are quick to know more than mind and its words.
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Addendum: Still wondering whether this sort of post is desirable--the internet makes me grasp how few non-poets care about poetry in English these days. Although I note that Iris the "interactive semi-conscious AI" seems to like Wallace Stevens. If you have an opinion, please say so!
