"Spring and Fall" and Uncertainty and Crying

I came to college as a journalism major, sure I would be a reporter someday. Don't worry- I'm over that. I loved journalism in high school and being editor for my school paper was the pinnacle of my four years. Turns out, I love editing more than I love writing- at least newswriting.

I found myself missing the reading and writing I fell in love with in my english classes. So I took the first class for English majors with Rick Simpson, and now I'm well on my way to a double major.

This semester, I'm in an intro to Brit lit. kind of class with all the second-semester freshmen. And the freshmen don't really bother me. I understand I'm a freshman when it comes to college English literature.

Last week, we read "Spring and Fall" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I don't like poetry, as a rule, but I do like the messages behind the poems. And this one has a pretty great message I could relate to.

Here's the poem:

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as 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 will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

I see parts of myself in this Margaret girl. She cries for uncertainty. She sees the trees losing their leaves in the fall and can't fathom that they will return in the spring. Her little mind can't understand that, so she cries.

In class, we talked about how people cry when emotions are too much to handle or when they can't figure out how to express them. Change and uncertainty are huge, abstract concepts. And personally, they scare me, too.

I've seen a lot of them in my life, and I can say they're hard emotions to express. So I write. My sister draws and paints. But these are just grown-up, acceptable forms of crying. We express these abstract concepts in abstract ways, never defining them or understanding them.

In the final line of the poem, Hopkins writes "It is Margaret you mourn for." He couldn't be more right. When we cry, or write, or draw, we do so for ourselves. Margaret cries because she realizes she will die one day, like the leaves. I "cry" because I know uncertainty will never go away.

I'm not sure this all made sense, but it's just me blubbering about myself anyway. So I guess it's not a big deal if it's a jumbled mess.