Spring and Fall bookend the season of flourishing and withering, and so it is the title of Gerard Manley Hopkins address to a young girl, who laments the passing of the multitudes of leaves in autumn. In this poem the author questions a child, Margaret, over the cause of her grief. She grieves over the falling leaves from an autumn grove, and it is heartfelt sadness, which prompts the poet to contemplate the causes and the nature of grief.
He notes that sincere grief is the same no matter the cause; it is just degree or the awareness of the griever that separates each moment of grief. He concludes that grief is a response in the human spirit to a realisation that all things fade and pass, and that grief is our own recognition of our own mortality.
“It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.”
This is the tragedy, and paradoxically, the beauty of life.
“All things fade and pass” is a phrase that enters the utterance of many who contemplate the precious frailty of youth. Of life that is young and vibrant, but which will soon pass.
While Patrick Pearse waited in his cell in the hours between midnight and his dawn execution, he brought a life time’s worth of ponderings and memories together in a few lines he called The Wayfarer
The seasons and eternity are juxtaposed; and the mortal cyclic trials of living, it is suggested, are a preparation for the eternal.
“Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;”
The reward for tending and reaping – the chores and duties of life dutifully completed – would reap eternal reward in the spiritual realm, he suggests. Immediately he reintroduces this idea that the spiritual is reflected in the attendance to the physical realm, and the conviction that to attend to these tasks is to release the full potential of the human person as a physical and spiritual being.
In these lines :
“Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht”
We see a tender grief in realizing the frailty of youth destined to pass. It has the sentimental regard for the innocence of the barefooted- the “cosnocht” – child whose bare feet stands as a metaphor for his innocence, but also his potential. For the child’s bare feet are delicate and vulnerable, but also a symbol of freedom and the vitality of life. The child has an appetite for life and it is the duty of a nation to ensure the full blossoming of that appetite into a culturally and spiritually fulfilled man or woman.
Pearse believed in nurturing that potential through education and, so to speak, clothing the child with the skills and intellect with which to engage with the world. In his writing on the education system we see his ideas expressed. He believed that the brutality of the schooling system – “the murder machine” – took the vulnerable, barefoot but free child, and repressively closed his spirit: made a “mere thing” of him or her.
Pearse preached that education should be inspiring and liberating and should seek out the spirit to nurture it. He sought the inspiration for this in the stories and myths of heroism.
In ‘The Murder Machine’ he wrote:
“Our school system must bring, too, some gallant inspiration. And with the inspiration it must bring a certain hardening. One scarcely knows whether modern sentimentalism or modern utilitarianism is the more sure sign of modern decadence.”
The distinction between the nurturing of the complete person comprised of the spiritual and the practical, with the secular equivalent of sentimentality and utilitarianism, is finely expressed in this short extract. What he is getting at is the biblical definition of love and the distinction between good and evil. In this world-view, love is “to will the good of the other”, and the root of evil is to willfully deceive.
The parting words of The Wayfarer reflect on the tragic brevity of life.
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.
Is this a tragedy to lament?
That depends.
Does the barefooted child flourish on the path of reaping and sowing? Does he reap in the end “close to the gates of heaven”? Maybe how we are touched by grief depends on how we can answer that question. Hopkins suggests that Margaret will realize that her life has a purpose and that even grief has its purpose as it impresses upon our consciousness the importance of truth and beauty, and the mystery of life.
Spring and Fall Spring and Fall – Margaret
Lorcán Mac Mathúna