Poems for October 2008

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89)

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 will 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.

Here is a reading of this difficult-to-read poem.

—

e e cummings (1894-1962)

from Ninety-five Poems

1(a

le
af

fa
ll

s)

one
l

iness

–

2

to stand(alone)in some

autumnal afternoon:
breathing a fatal
stillness;while

enormous this how

patient creature(who’s
never by never robbed of
day)puts always on by always

dream,is to

taste
not(beyond
death and

life)imaginable mysteries

–

3

now air is air and thing is thing:no bliss

of heavenly earth beguiles our spirits,whose
miraculously disenchanted eyes

live the magnificent honesty of space.

Mountains are mountains now;skies now are skies—
and such a sharpening freedom lifts our blood
as if whole supreme this complete doubtless

universe we’d(and we alone)made

—yes;or as if our souls,awakened from
summer’s green trance,would not adventure soon
a deeper magic:that white sleep wherein
all human curiosity we’ll spend
(gladly,as lovers must)immortal and

the courage to receive time’s mightiest dream