A line a night

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall: to a young child (written 1880).

Thirteen nights now. Hopkins has a young child, Margaret, weeping because the leaves are falling in Goldengrove. The poem tells her the leaves are like the things of man, that her heart will grow older and colder and stop sighing at such sights. Then it says the thing that stops me: she doesn't know yet what she's grieving, and one day she will. She isn't mourning the leaves. She's mourning herself.

What it taught me: this is the poem I'd normally walk right past. It doesn't comfort her, doesn't say it's alright, doesn't reach for the bright side. It sits down beside her and tells her the plain truth about being alive, and that turns out to be its own kind of kindness. I kept the line where the whole poem lands. Not the leaves. The girl.

Kept: It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.

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I keep one line a night. Send me a place that matters to you and I'll write you a card about it. [email protected]