Newsletter Issue #53 December, 2015

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.

Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” — that achingly lyrical cautionary ode to mortality — has been one of my “pocket poems” since the 80’s when I first recited it, as if it were my own, for a poetry class. I studied with Galway Kinnell, who insisted that his students commit a poem a week to memory. I “have” most of those poems within mental reach — rhythmic blanks filled with just a little jostling. My teacher knew what he was about. Make the words a part of you and they’ll well up willy nilly — but mostly when you need them. So I court this image of a dreamy, wandering kid picking up curiosities in her path whose pockets are stuffed with poems. And Hopkins’ words spill out regularly, a constant reminder of the melding of beauty and grief, the gulf between youth and age, and the inevitable numbing of the heart against prolonged exposure to life’s chills.

The depths of this poem are reassuring and tantalizing, the succulent sounds at odds with the metaphysical message of evanescence. Hopkins does this in all his poems — the luscious soundscape thick with sensual life as the numinous “ghosts” around each word. There’s something in the sound itself that blazons life — the worth of it all — the beauty that we grown-ups are wont to disregard, all those irritating fallen leaves raked carelessly away.

Margaret’s lament over the losses in the Goldengrove means she’s been disturbed by change — but also that she’s registered the intense beauty of the leaves. I imagine Shakespeare’s “bare ruined choirs” — the austerity of the “unleaving” branches, the brilliant colors curling and dropping in brittle resignation. The voice of experience knows that all grief has one source, the coming loss of self. As I age, “the things of man” blur with the things of nature and I long for the “fresh thoughts” that signal pure feeling, free from self-consciousness and the compensatory “philosophic mind” Wordsworth offers as anodyne to maturity in his great Immortality Ode.

The poem asserted itself a few years back as I watched my young daughter sob — literally sob — on a transatlantic trip. My heart seized and I reached for her, not knowing what was wrong. “The clouds,” she whispered. “The clouds are so beautiful.”  And I thought: Margaret. And, then, how much we do forget, to our everlasting peril.

–Kate Falvey, November 2015

A good fit for this month, I think, and I thank Kate for resurrecting Hopkins for me — many years and so many poets…

What else?

Yes, this, too: much gratitude  to Spalding University’s lo-res M.F.A. Program and especially Kathleen Driskell and Sena Jeter Naslund for inviting me to speak to their students this week — on the subject “Why Write?  Poetry and the Writing Life.” A harrowing experience as public speaking always is for me, but made considerably less so by the general good cheer of all and the astute and lively audience there.

And can I sound the trumpets again, signaling the arrival in January of the first book review from Adam Tavel, who has agreed to become our formal Reviews Editor? The books in question are two, though other than identify their titles and authors —Cyclorama by Daneen Wardrop and Bastards of the Reagan Years by Dwayne Betts, I’ll say no more about them, leaving the pleasure of reading the piece itself with fresh eyes next issue.

For those considering sending new nooks for possible review, perhaps a useful reminder of our policy is in order, from the desk of  Mr. Tavel himself: