Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem Spring and Fall depicts a child coming to terms with death, and the speaker makes that child aware of their maturing and mortality. 

Acknowledging the fact that this poem is addressed to a child is already engaging in itself. It is common for a child to eventually grapple with the concept that they will one day die, just as everything will. This is articulated in the poem through the opening lines, which suggest the child is saddened by the leaves falling.

This is quite interesting as the poem’s title invokes a cyclical nature, Spring and Fall. This is a constant cycle, which begs the question, what changes? How is this poem about mortality if there is an endless cycle of birth and death? The answer is this child, Margaret, is mortal. While the nature of children, in general, is cyclical, with them being born each year and coming to terms with the world that surrounds them and for them to have more children, which repeats the process, the nature of a specific child isn’t. For the first time, Margaret can comprehend that nothing lasts. This is a problematic notion for a child to grow out of, as when one is born, they are led to believe that everything around them is constant. This concept fades with maturity, referenced in the lines “as the heart grows older / It will come to such sights colder” (6-7). 

It is also interesting that the poem gradually increases its complexity from the beginning to the end, just as a child can comprehend more complex concepts as they age. It starts by just talking about the leaves falling and how it may be sad to see this, but it grows into all things dying and that Margaret, the child, will die at one point, too. This is particularly interesting as, realistically, Margaret wouldn’t be able to understand all of these concepts as she has yet to reach that level. As readers, however, we have a particular insight into the awakening that she will one day have.

Gerard Hopkins’ God’s Grandeur presents a Petrarchan sonnet that makes various assertions about god’s power and humanity. The first lines of both the poem’s octave and sestet contain alliteration that helps emphasize figurative language and imagery pertaining to god (of god himself in the octave and nature in the sestet) that paint him as powerful and all-knowing, unsurprisingly given the title. In between these sections, the poem disparages the actions of man and their unwillingness to “reck his rod”, suggesting that “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell” (4-7). 

These elements to me form the central conceit of the poem–between the idea that god is all-powerful and should be obeyed, and the fact that with humanity he created something being presented as terrible and destroying the world. This contrast reminds me of our discussion on Ozymandias, in that god–in my interpretation–doesn’t have true control over humanity, he is only capable of creating them. This notion closely parallels the idea of Ozymandias’ legacy being out of his control and the themes that the poem presents. I also found that the way the poem deviates from Petrarchan sonnet’s typical rhyme scheme of iambic pentameter in various lines serves to support the idea of chaos and lack of control.

This poem is heartbreaking, to put it simply. There’s something so deeply profound and human about the experience of becoming aware of death, realizing that life cannot go on forever. Even though, at surface level, the poem is discussing the change of seasons, from spring to autumn, it is clear from the very beginning that the words represent a far deeper meaning. The speaker, coming from a place of age, experience, and wisdom, addresses “a young child” who is identified as “Margaret”. The girl herself represents a sort of spring, full of youth and blooming. She later becomes directly referenced in the place of spring, a conceit that develops as the poem progresses. The speaker describes the sadness of autumn, although to that point, I found it noteworthy that Hopkins, a British poet, uses the word “fall” rather than the more British “autumn”. Perhaps this is because the word connects to the larger theme, death, referencing the inevitable fall of each human life that the poem explores. It also explores the hardness that comes with age, telling young Margaret that “as the heart grows older/ It will come to such sights colder/ By and by, nor spare a sigh” (5-7). With each passing year, the heart will become more and more jaded as it begins to encounter loss, until it is completely unphased by it. In fact, the speaker ends the poem on an eternally tragic note, saying, “It ís the blight man was born for,/ It is Margaret you mourn for” (14-15). This is the encapsulating message of the poem— humankind was born to die, and it is youth, spring, that everyone yearns for.

On a separate note, the meter wholeheartedly confused me. I read somewhere that it was “sprung” meter, (which I thought was a funny play on the word spring, but probably wasn’t the intention of the author) and I couldn’t quite understand how the meter would be used in the poem. There weren’t any distinct, fixed rules, making the meter pretty hard to follow.

When reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Lord Tennyson Alfred, I was a little confused as to whether he was mocking the 600 British soldiers of the Charge of the Light Brigade or if he wrote this poem as tribute to them. After my first read, I thought he was honoring the soldiers commending them for being loyal and fighting on the battlefield, which I thought was made referenced to by the phrase “valley of Death” (16). Alfred finishes the poem with the last few lines saying, “Honor the charge they made! / Honor the Light Brigade, / “Noble six hundred!” (53-55). However, after a second read through, the song-like rhythm of the poem seemed to lighten the tone of the poem as seen in stanzas 3 and 5. This is ironic because if he was truly honoring them, I felt that the poem would have taken a more serious tone and form. After a couple reads, I believe that this poem is more of a satire than a tribute to the British soldiers. 

The poetic diction also adds a comical effect. In line 6, one of the quotes said, “Charge for the guns!” which to me sounds so foolish. These soldiers seem to be carrying swords, referred to as “sabers,” to a gun fight? It seems almost obvious that they are going to lose the battle right from the first stanza. Later on in the poem, he writes that someone “blundered” that no soldier should question or try to make reason of what they are commanded to do, but instead, just do it (12-14). This word means “to utter thoughtlessly; blurt out.”¹ It turned the notion of what the soldier was saying, which was something that could have been applauded for loyalty, obedience, or bravery, into something that now sounds foolish. Especially with the following line saying, “Theirs but to do and die” (15). Obviously, if someone were to be sent on a mission with failure from the start knowing they were going to die, it would make sense for that person to question the logic. Here, the soldiers are misguided to blindly obey orders even when they don’t make logical sense. In the footnote, it says that the British soldiers were given confusing orders which caused them to recklessly be killed by the Russians. If they fully thought about the directions they were given and spoke up instead of just obeying, the charge could have been avoided and there wouldn’t have been so many pointless deaths. The second stanza makes it seem like they were told to march into the “valley of Death” in which anyone could have predicted they were going to lose from the start, but no one questioned it. They just mindlessly obeyed. 

In stanza 4, there is imagery of them waving their swords aimlessly as they “[f]lashed all their sabers bare” (27). This line gives a humorous tone, by making the soldiers look foolish. They were defeated as their sabers were no match for the powerful Russian cannons. In stanza 6, Alfred describes their charge as “wild” which also is an odd word choice for something that is supposed to pay tribute. If this was the case, better words like “brave” or “steadfast” would have been better to praise the actions of the soldiers. Alfred’s true intentions behind the poem seem to be more insulting. 

¹https://www.dictionary.com/browse/blunder

They say that war never changes— that destruction will follow its waking path. In “Casabianca” by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, we see those flames in the views of an admiral’s naïve son as he sails to his death without a single command to fall back from his deceased father.

The poem has a ballad meter— alternating iambic tetrameter–iambic trimeter— and an ABAB rhyme scheme. The conciseness of the stanzas and lines describe the true story of Admiral Casabianca’s son as he sails the L’Orient to his explosive death at the hands of British soldiers in the Battle of the Nile. It characterizes the son as a brave lad who did not back down from his task when his father and the soldiers around him were deceased. The boy stood on the flaming docks, yelling for orders beyond the booming shots. Yet, tragedy is revealed in the second to last stanza when a “burst of thunder sound” (Line 33) strikes the ship. The boy had been lost, and so was his vessel.

The fact that this poem was written from the perspective of a child who once lived makes its narrative more heartbreaking. Even though the poem highlights his actions as heroic and noble, I find it cruel to even write about this child. This child, who had so much potential, had his life snuffed out by British soldiers attacking from both sides of the ship. He could’ve grown to be anything, but instead, he became another victim of war. And this glorification of war makes me feel sick as it tears up families and lays waste to homes. I understand that our views of war have shifted over the centuries, but there should’ve been some realization that this is messed up! And that’s what hurts the most, especially with the recent wars in this decade.