… into being,” writes Elaine Scarry in Beauty and Being Just.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Spring and Fall, keeps doing that – spinning off songs and films inspired by it, more than a century after it was written.
Not copies. Scarry didn’t mean exact copies. Aesthetic ripples, echoes.
As in the just-released film, Margaret, which features “an English class recitation of [this] stirring and enigmatic Victorian poem addressed to a young girl of that name.” Spring and Fall is a very morbid poem, and the film has a morbid theme — a kind of coming of age via coming to grips with death theme — that fits the Hopkins poem nicely. When you’re young, you cry over dead things in a babyish visceral way, but you don’t really understand death yet. You’re a kind of mindless sentimentalist, a kitsch-meister. When you’re older, you get it – you understand precisely what death is, and why you’re crying over it. It’s the same fact of death generating the same grief when you’re eight and when you’re eighty, but you have to get significantly past eight to realize this, to feel the reality of death. Apparently the film Margaret is all about the main character’s passage from innocence to experience in this regard.
Hopkins takes this process of death-realization one step further at the very end of the poem:
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Our profoundest death-haunting is of course our intimation of our own mortality, so a third phase in this eerie maturation involves a movement somewhat away from despair over other people’s annihilation and toward anticipatory pity for ourselves — toward a sense of our own fragility, our implication in the common fate. The slightly wobbly, slow, vulnerable, meditative, confiding, whispery setting of the Hopkins lines that Natalie Merchant wrote and performed – with a simple melancholy guitar along for the ride – seems to UD quite a good capture of the poem. Here’s the poem.
Spring and Fall
to a young child
MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! 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.
So, you’re crying because the leaves are falling, and all the golden colors are vanishing. Fine. Cry. Your pure emotions make you feel for everything. You feel as much for one dead leaf as you do for human beings, which is pretty strange, but goes to your indiscriminate, innocent, open, heart, unacquainted with the night.
Once you’ve gotten your share of human suffering and death, massive piles of leaves will leave you unmoved. Maturation means losing cosmic, undifferentiated feeling, and directing things like grief where they belong: toward the people you love and lose. Weeping isn’t just acting out now, a visceral reaction to random loss-tableaux; now you will weep and know why.
It doesn’t matter that you don’t yet realize your grief, that you think of your tears as exclusively about the leaves. You’re young. Enjoy it while you can. But even though you can’t articulate the truer, later grief, you probably, even now, intuit it. Probably even now some ghostly soulful understanding in you guesses what underlies childish tears: Grief for all of blighted humankind.
And even more deeply underlying: Grief for your own blightedness.
October 1st, 2011 at 7:40AM
“Dear, dear Norland,” said Elinor, “probably looks much as it always does at this time of year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves.”
“Oh!” cried Marianne, “with what transporting sensations have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight.”
“It is not every one,” said Elinor, “who has your passion for dead leaves.”
October 1st, 2011 at 7:56AM
Wonderful excerpt, jim.