Source identified1
Image design Golden Hour
Read & copy
“Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
Meaning & context
Hopkins begins with a child grieving autumn leaves and gradually widens that feeling into a meditation on human awareness of loss, change and mortality.
Source details
“Spring and Fall: to a young child,” written in 1880 and published posthumously in 1918, represented by Poetry Foundation. Margaret is the poem’s addressed child; the meditation is literary and theological rather than a clinical account of grief development.