Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844â€89). Poems 1918, Spring and Fall: To a young child :: essays research papers fc

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems 1918, Spring and Fall: To a young child Mà RGARÉT, à ¡re you grà ­eving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leà ¡ves, là ­ke the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? à h! à ¡s the heart grows older 5 It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wà ­ll weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: 10 Sà ³rrow’s sprà ­ngs à ¡re the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It à ­s the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. Gerard Manley Hopkins was an innovator whose poetry was not published until decades after his death. Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, which is near London. He attended Balliol College, University of Oxford. While attending the university, Hopkins was sporadically occupied with verse writing. His passion for religion becomes clearly evident during this time through his poems. His poems revealed a very Catholic character, most of them being abortive, the beginnings of things, ruins and wrecks, as he called them. (Gardner 6) In 1866, he converted to Roman Catholicism, during the Oxford movement. John Henry Newman received him into the Roman Catholic Church. He left Oxford to become a priest, and entered the Jesuit Order in 1868. This is the time when Gerard Manley Hopkins presented a conflict of a man torn between two vocations, religion and the aesthetic world. He also presented a heroic struggle of a man who was so dedicated to one profession that he deliberately sacrificed anoth er profession based on the belief that God willed it to be so. Hopkins is well known for his creation of the term inscape. Inscape can be considered as an individual distinctive beauty. The sensation of inscape, any vivid mental image, is known as instress. (Gardner 11) For Hopkins, inscape was more than sensory impression. It was an insight; by Divine grace into an ultimate reality by seeing the pattern, air, and melody as it were God’s side. (Gardner 27) In "Spring and Fall", Hopkins demonstrates a separation between humanity and nature and a separation between humanity and God. His use of imagery and his sympathetic tone allows the readers to make both distinctions and similarities between adult and child, nature and man, and conscious and intuitive knowledge. The poem is addressed to a child.