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.