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Maya C. Popa on Gerard Manley Hopkins ("Spring and Fall")
2.1k Plays2 years ago
One of those poems that makes you feel like its ending is perfect, inevitable. I talked with Maya C. Popa about Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring and Fall."
Maya is a poet, critic, scholar, and teacher. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: American Faith (Sarabande, 2019) and Wound is the Origin of Wonder (Norton, 2022). She is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches creative writing at the Nightingale-Bamford School and NYU. She has a Ph.D. from Goldsmiths, University of London, on the role of wonder in poetry, a topic she writes about in her Substack. You can also follow Maya on Twitter.
As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you're following it. Leave a rating or review, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack for thoughts and links to go with each episode.
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Transcript
Introduction to Maya C. Popa
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I am so thrilled to see on my computer screen, you can't see her on yours, but I can see her on mine, Maya C. Popa. Maya is a poet and a critic and a teacher and scholar. She's all of these things. She's somebody I've been really looking forward to having on the podcast.
00:00:28
Speaker
And she, all on her own, chose a poem that I was hoping somebody would choose because I just love hearing it. I love thinking about it. I haven't really had a chance to talk about it. It occurs to me, even as I say that, that for some reason I don't think this is a poem I've taught, which is maybe an odd thing, given how much I
Selection of 'Spring and Fall' by Hopkins
00:00:50
Speaker
love it. But anyway, I won't hold you in suspense any longer. The poem is Spring and Fall by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
00:01:00
Speaker
And it is a poem, as is always the case for us, it is a poem to which you will find a link in the episode notes. So I recommend, well, for those of you who want to be looking at a text as we talk, you'll be able to find it there.
00:01:19
Speaker
and you'll be able to find more information to go with the information you find in the episode, and you'll find more information in the newsletter that will come out with this episode. But before we get to the poem and Hopkins, let me tell you more about our guest today.
Maya's Works and Roles
00:01:41
Speaker
As I say, Maya C. Popa is a poet. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry,
00:01:49
Speaker
Her first, American Faith, came out in 2019. And then more recently, Maya's second book came out. The book is wonderful. I mean, the first is wonderful too, but the second I have been spending time with recently, and I'm really loving, her second full-length book is called Wound is the Origin of Wonder, and that came out in 2022 from Norton.
00:02:16
Speaker
And I'll say a few words more about that book and about the kind of poet that Maya is in a moment, but let me tell you first about some of the other wonderful things she does. Maya is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly, which is
00:02:34
Speaker
I would imagine a largely thankless but hugely important job. She's really a steward of poetry, of the poetry publishing world in this way. So doing wonderful work has been doing wonderful work at Publishers Weekly for a while. She's also a teacher. She teaches creative writing at the Nightingale Bamford School in New York and also at NYU.
00:03:03
Speaker
where I think she has a degree from, is that right, Maya? Maya is also, like me, has entered the substack world, but is doing it better than I do, I think. She's doing it for real. She's got a substack called Poetry Today, where she shares poems, she shares thoughts about poems, she shares some of her research there, and her research,
00:03:30
Speaker
is on the topic of wonder in poetry.
Research and Themes in Maya's Work
00:03:34
Speaker
Maya just earned a PhD from Goldsmiths, the University of London, on that topic, which is a wonderful topic. It's a topic that's clearly present in her poetry.
00:03:45
Speaker
as well as her critical and scholarly work. And maybe we'll have occasion over the course of this conversation to talk about the role that wonder plays in a poem like the one that we're talking about today. It's just such a beautiful poem, but okay. Let me quote a bit of Maya to her and hope she doesn't die of embarrassment.
00:04:09
Speaker
in the process. So I was reading an interview that she gave recently in McSweeney's, I think on the occasion of the publication of this new book of poems. And in that interview, she said the following, quote, delivering wonder alive requires a very finely tuned balance between knowing and not knowing. End quote.
00:04:38
Speaker
I think that very finely tuned balance is something that is everywhere on display in Maya's work. It's there in the poetry where it's clear, reading her work, that this is a poet who knows a great deal. This is a poet who has
00:04:57
Speaker
also trained as a scholar. She has, in her mind and in her lived experience, a whole kind of library of texts, a series of poetic models that she's drawing from, that she's learned from.
00:05:18
Speaker
But you don't feel the weight of that as a reader of her work. That is, she handles that learning with a beautifully light touch, with a kind of
00:05:36
Speaker
simplicity and modesty that unlocks I think what she would call the experience of wonder as a reader of her poems.
Impact of Maya's Poetry
00:05:51
Speaker
So, you know, like there was one poem in her book that has really been pressing itself on me in a way of late. The poem is called The Present Speaks of Past Pain.
00:06:05
Speaker
And I'll link to that poem and I'll link to, I mean, in addition to linking to her books, I'll see if I can provide a link to that poem or some other particular poems from my book in the text that goes out with the episode.
00:06:21
Speaker
That poem is like many of the poems in the book, I guess, in that it's among other things interested in or in the, it's exploring in a way the experience of things like grief and loss and pain, but also is looking with open eyes at the world that it's in.
00:06:45
Speaker
And here's what it sees. Here are two lines from Maya's poem that have just astounded me. The sky filled with stars that had been there already. So simply said, there's nothing ornate or fussy about that language. It's a simple statement.
00:07:12
Speaker
a fact, but it's a fact that hits you like a revelation because it's pointing out something that's sort of true about the world. As I say this now, I look out the window to the sky and I see that the sky is blue. I don't see any stars. I don't even see the one star that I might see during the day, the sun. But they're all there. And Maya's poem has helped me look at the sky in a different way, you know, at the blue sky in a different way.
00:07:42
Speaker
knowing that night is coming and that something else is waiting to be revealed to me. So that's a wonderful thing that poetry can do and it's a thing that Maya's poetry does do and that Maya's work with poetry, not just her own poetry but with poetry in general,
00:08:01
Speaker
is always working towards, and it's one of the reasons why I so appreciate her presence in the world, in the poetry world, and in my life.
Podcast Atmosphere from NYC
00:08:14
Speaker
Maya, someone I'm happy to begin to be counting as a friend. Maya C. Popo, welcome to Close Readings. Tell me how you're doing today. Thank you so much.
00:08:26
Speaker
You know, that's a disarmingly generous introduction. So I'm sort of speechless, but grateful and well, thank you. How are you doing? I'm doing OK. I think I hear I hear a siren in the background. I thought it would be interesting to have some acoustic urgency. Yeah. And come in just as I started speaking. I hope that's fine.
00:08:46
Speaker
No, it's totally fine. Maya's phoning into this podcast from New York City and you can hear it there. That's where I am, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Discussing 'Spring and Fall' Selection
00:09:00
Speaker
So, Maya, tell me just before we dive into the poem, tell me, you know, when you and I chatted a while back about you coming on the podcast,
00:09:12
Speaker
I've become curious and thinking, because it strikes me that it's sort of a funny thing to ask someone, okay, you're a person, whoever the guest is, one thing you all have in common is you love poetry and you have poems coming out of your ears and so on. And then I ask you to choose one. And I've noticed, I've been noticing that that charge, that assignment, for lack of a better word,
00:09:40
Speaker
has raised interesting questions for various guests on the podcast. And I wonder what, if any, questions it raised for you or what the experience was like of choosing this poem. Well, I sort of knew right away I wanted to do this poem that I perhaps may have suggested something like three to you that we're all in the top five. But the thought of being a vehicle for another reader who may not be familiar with this poet or poem
00:10:09
Speaker
to experience something like what I first experienced when I read it in college and that set me sort of deeply into love with Hopkins to the degree that I then ended up doing my M.A.
Maya's Initial Encounter with Hopkins
00:10:22
Speaker
at Oxford on his work. I mean, I thought this poem was so extraordinary in the way that it moves and the way that its insights are revealed to itself. And then again in the reader's mind as the reader kind of parses through it.
00:10:36
Speaker
is amazing. So I think, again, I wonder if for many of us asked to choose a poem, there isn't kind of a secret pleasure in knowing that this might be the first time that someone hears it and they get to hear it through your voice reading it and talking about it. And so it's kind of thrilling to think that that might be the case. Yeah, well, that's a lovely and fascinating answer. And it makes me curious, like,
00:11:01
Speaker
Can you remember, in a way, the actual circumstances of your first reading? You said it was in college. Can you remember the class? Can you remember the book? I had a professor called Peggy Ellsberg, and she was one of these Hopkins fanatics. And so she would also sprinkle wonderfully descriptive anecdotes and eccentric anecdotes about Hopkins.
00:11:29
Speaker
between poems. And so I think in that way, I fell as much in love with the poetry as with Hopkins as a character. And then, you know, I loved how he bent English syntax to his will. I mean, that was evident from the moment you start reading it. Your mouth is doing strange things that your brain has to kind of catch up with. Verbs are turning into nouns.
00:11:54
Speaker
there's constant alliteration and assonance and repetition and jam stresses. And when you read, you know,
00:12:03
Speaker
The version I have I think has removed the extra linguistic pitches, but you'll read a Hopkins poem in manuscript form and see all of these strange accents over the vowels so that the reader would know how to accent what's being read. So it felt very much like English and not English, and it felt like he was sort of a... There was something kind of not of this world about his writing and about him.
00:12:32
Speaker
you know, like many poets who are interested in the numinous and the mystical, there's a lot of that. Yeah, I mean, I guess, obviously, once we get started with the poem, we'll have plenty of occasion to talk about what seems strange about it, even as in other ways, it feels like I mean, it's a poem that is, among other things,
00:12:51
Speaker
at least primarily or in its way of describing itself,
Audience and Themes in 'Spring and Fall'
00:12:56
Speaker
addressed to a child. And so, you know, you might think that a poem that was addressed to a child would be not strange, but, you know, familiar and sort of comforting or easy. I don't know that this poem is not those things, but it has a strange relation to them in a way.
00:13:21
Speaker
Yeah, so we'll have a chance to think about all of that. So for people who don't know anything, who didn't have Maya's lovely experience of reading Hopkins in college with a great teacher or at all, maybe just worth saying a couple of things. So this is an English poet who was born in 1844 and died in 1889.
00:13:51
Speaker
so not as long a life as he was owed. The poem Spring and Fall was written in the fall or the early fall, I think, of 1880, so Hopkins would have been in his mid-30s at that point, and he
00:14:13
Speaker
And I guess maybe worth saying too about his sort of career as a poet, though he's a much loved poet now and widely read. And some of his poems, including this one, are real classics, you know, heavily anthologized and frequently taught poems and that kind of thing.
00:14:33
Speaker
He seems to me also like a man who was uncertain of his success in the publishing world of the day and perhaps frustrated by a kind of reception that wasn't
00:14:57
Speaker
suiting his ambitions in some ways. So, yeah, interesting to, I guess, keep those kinds of things in mind. Maya, we're going to turn to the poem in a minute, but it looked like maybe there was something you wanted to say before we got there. I was going to say that in some ways, what's most interesting to me is that his relationship to the endeavor of publishing or writing at all was so conflicted. He became a Jesuit, he was a Jesuit priest and had a very
00:15:23
Speaker
hard time reconciling his appetite for writing and for kind of distributing any of the work with that vocation. He actually burned. I mean, we have a very small number of poems. He burned a lot of his work. And in a letter to his friend Bridges at one point, he says, you know, the only thing that truly inspires him, he can't make capital. I mean, he says something like, I cannot make capital of my inspiration. So he really, truly felt that
00:15:54
Speaker
there was something un-pious in moments about appetite for the writing. And then in other, we know he suffered with severe depression. In other moments, his sort of relationship to the endeavor of writing and to the practice
00:16:11
Speaker
is slightly more fluid and natural and less sort of harrowing. But at other points, he feels one would say borderline guilt for sort of being involved in this at all. Yeah. Well, that's a really fascinating portrait. You've just given us an insight into his attitudes towards publishing and writing that you've just given us an at risk, I guess, of like,
00:16:35
Speaker
psychoanalyzing our poet before we started reading his poem. I guess one thing I would just note is you made reference earlier to all of the kind of, I don't know what to call them exactly, diacritical marks he makes over his...
00:16:52
Speaker
over certain syllables and so on. And if you know something about Hopkins, you may have heard of his theory of or practice of something called sprung rhythm. I think we'll have perhaps some occasion to talk about what rhythm looks like in this poem and not worry over much about defining the term because it seemed to be a term that he defined differently at different points in his career. But the thing I wanted to say
00:17:19
Speaker
was just that there's an odd kind of, it's almost like there's a desire to control the readerly experience, to manage it.
00:17:34
Speaker
in a way that you don't often, I mean, you know, I guess there are some poets who are like that, you know, who want the reader to read the poem the right, you know, the right way with the right stresses in the right places and so forth. But I wonder, you know, sort of putting that impulse alongside
00:17:59
Speaker
the kind of misgivings that you've just described him having about the whole endeavor. On the one hand, you want to say, oh, those things seem very different. And on the other, maybe they're like two sides of the same coin or something. Yeah. And the deeper irony here is that all of this sprung rhythm is meant to imitate the natural tones of scope.
00:18:22
Speaker
speech. And you're like, really? At the end of the day, all these these accents are in service of naturalness. So I think what we're getting at is the sort of complicated figure Hopkins was. And I think, again, part of why I so fell in love with it is that, you know, it's interesting when five sentences into discussing a poet, you're already bringing up three terms that either he coined or he's known for, or these sort of idiosyncrasies that feel
00:18:51
Speaker
and make him so alive some 150 years later, I think that's sort of exciting. But yes, we're quaint. It's a prism that's hard to reconcile in moments. Yeah, okay, but so let's, I think high time that we put some meat on the bone here and give people a chance to experience this poem.
Reading of 'Spring and Fall'
00:19:13
Speaker
And I love what you said earlier about how part of the thrill of making the choice was the idea that for some people,
00:19:20
Speaker
They would hear the poem, they would hear it for the first time, and they would hear it in Maya's voice. I recognized after that it sounded as though, you know, it's a sort of solve-sister or self-involved approach. But rather it's that I'm, hello, everyone who's listening. I'm very, very privileged to be able to read this poem to you. I hope I do it justice. It is amazing, and I hope it's your first time to enjoy it.
00:19:43
Speaker
It reminds me of when I, I mean, don't, you don't need to apologize for solipsism. This is after all a poetry podcast, right? But, you know, it reminds me of, I did, I've done a very little amateurish, but like as a student tried my hand at translating sometimes, right?
00:20:03
Speaker
I remember part of the wonder of that experience being like, these words are coming out of my fingers. I'm a genius. It's because I was translating Proust or something. How am I thinking of all this?
00:20:21
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I'm Hopkins. Right. OK, so so yeah, what we're going to hear now and remember, there will be a link for people who want to look as Maya reads, but we're going to hear now Maya Popa read the poem that she's chosen for today's discussion. Go ahead, Maya. Spring and fall to a young child. Margaret, are you grieving over Golden Grove's unleaving?
00:20:49
Speaker
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, the worlds of one would leaf meal lie. And yet, you will weep and know why. Now, no matter child, the name.
00:21:17
Speaker
Saru's springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed, what heart heard of, ghost guessed.
Analysis of Final Lines
00:21:28
Speaker
It is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret you mourn for.
00:21:37
Speaker
Oh, that's great. Thank you, Maya. Those last two lines, you know, I don't want to talk about them yet. I want to save them for the end of our discussion. But my God, those are two, you know, memorable lines of poetry. So here's a first question for you.
Significance of the Poem's Title
00:22:00
Speaker
Why is the poem called Spring and Fall?
00:22:04
Speaker
I mean, it's a poem. I mean, sorry, so I'll ask I'll ask the kind of naive question here. It seems to be a poem about fall. You know, and and and sorry, and just one more thing, like it, you know, it's also true. I mean, it happens to be true. Like we're we happen to be having this conversation just as we're about to turn into spring.
00:22:25
Speaker
Um, and I can't remember, I'm not good enough at thinking of the calendar in my mind when this episode, oh, you know, I think in fact, this episode may post on the equinox. Uh, yeah, which is amazing. But the poem seems not to be about in any, you know, it's, um, so this first two lines, Margaret, are you grieving over Golden Grove? Unleaving? Yes. Um, seem to be about, um,
00:22:55
Speaker
you know, addressed to a girl who may or may not be upset about her favorite tree or something like that. Golden Grove is a kind of, what, invented name for a sort of a tree, you know? So maybe we're meant to imagine a certain kind of tree with golden leaves. Yeah, so where, you know, why spring and fall? It's such a good question. I think it plays into the amazing relationship
00:23:24
Speaker
that Hopkins has to simplicity and complexity and to a larger religious paradigm that's always beating underneath his work. So I think one first thing to note is that he was deeply influenced by Ignatian spirituality. And in the Ignatian spiritual exercises, there's the sense of Christ being in nature, the patterns of nature are somehow Christed, right? They are muscular with the essence of Christ. And, you know,
00:23:53
Speaker
To answer now more directly, I think the child is the spring here, figuratively, the beginning. I see. And fall being what commences a decline. One season begins life, the other commences a decline. So from the title, we already have the sort of spiritual tension, I think. And then, of course, a priest can't include the word fall and not have it sort of be a nod to fall. Sure. And of Adam and Eve.
00:24:21
Speaker
It's interesting too that the poem is dedicated to a child because so many of his poems are dedicated to God. And I think again, that's part of the way he reconciles himself to writing in the first place. Wreck of the Deutschland, which is his sort of magnum opus dedicated to nuns who had drowned, but is still for the glory of God. So I think in some ways addressing the poem to a child
00:24:47
Speaker
And the word spring actually appears in the poem, right? Sorry, springs are the same, allows the poem to address an existential question that intrinsically has religious stakes behind it. Okay. And so just to like push a little harder on that for the moment, the religious stakes here have to do with
00:25:09
Speaker
the fact of the poem's addressee being a child because for Hopkins, for the way Hopkins experienced religion, the child is a kind of heavily significant
Child's Existential Awakening in the Poem
00:25:23
Speaker
figure. That's one way to read it, but I meant more sort of the arc of human life from birth to death. So what she's sort of dramatizing in the poem is her existential awakening, right?
00:25:38
Speaker
is that she sort of sees the patterns of nature that are continuous and will go on and existed before she's there and will continue on after she's there, and her grief will be tied into that. And there's a sense that, again, from the fall onwards, we experience this grief that's owed to us, right, that is not redeemed. If we're not in the garden anymore, we don't live forever anymore, you know, sort of like a post-lapsarian
00:26:06
Speaker
coming to terms with the post-lapsarian world. So I think I might read it that way. But again, I see the spring as being so much her, right? In some ways she is that early stage of life where we don't know death. And then the rest of life is knowing death. Most of our life is knowing death. Well, it seems, yeah, sorry, sorry. No, no, I was going to say it's just a very, it's sort of a brief and hollow period that we don't. Yeah.
00:26:35
Speaker
Right. It seems like she's being, you know, the sort of narrative arc of the poem or something is that from the beginning of the poem, she's being confronted with the death of something outside of her.
Narrative Arc and Mortality Themes
00:26:49
Speaker
But the poet has another message for her by the poem's end, which, yes, I can see how the reading that you've just been intimating for us
00:27:06
Speaker
sort of maps itself onto that plot or arc or whatever, such as it is. Okay, so title, good. So, she's the spring in a way. Now subtitle or dedication. To a young child. We're really not going to go phrase by phrase necessarily. So, to a young child.
00:27:27
Speaker
you know, I guess I can imagine at least two, I want to say, but maybe I'm sort of splitting hairs here, that there are two slightly different ways of understanding what to a young child is doing. So, you know, in the first maybe it's sort of like a stage direction or something, right? Like,
00:27:49
Speaker
we are to imagine the poem as being spoken to a young child. And that makes sense with the first word of the poem, which sort of addresses her, Margaret. But maybe we've also referred to that as a dedication.
00:28:06
Speaker
which seems like a slightly different gesture to me. So I don't know, I guess take this as an invitation to think in any way that you want to about the effect of putting those words under the title.
00:28:22
Speaker
to a young child, or if you prefer, just more generally thinking about when not all poems have, most poems don't have, named speakers, certain, sorry, not speakers, addresses.
00:28:41
Speaker
certain poems do. You know, love poems often do, right? So that, you know, we go back all the way to the first poem I did in this series with Brian Glavy when we read Having a Coke with You, Frank O'Hara's Having a Coke with You. So that's a poem that's like, O'Hara is on the one hand addressing his lover, Vincent Warren,
00:29:04
Speaker
but he's doing it as a poem so that that is in a way a kind of like conceit and the understanding is that the address to the one person in particular will be overheard by readers in general.
00:29:20
Speaker
at least as I understand it, there isn't an actual Margaret here. It's kind of a fictional creation, right? So I don't know, what is the idea of addressing the poem to the child to be overheard by readers who are presumably mostly not themselves children? What's that doing for you, Maya? It's the first time I've ever stopped to think deeply about it. I'll be honest, I almost felt like it was there so that
00:29:48
Speaker
one goes in knowing that Margaret is a child rather than waiting for now no matter child the name. But I think you ask to find questions or to propose to sort of find readings of it and I'll certainly think more about it. I guess you're right, we wouldn't know that she was a child necessarily.
00:30:10
Speaker
until it might be implied. But there is something about the tone of it that is sweetened even in the reader's own ear by no other child. Even if it's not a poem, a sing-songy poem for a child, though it does have some degree of that kind of cadence to it that it plays off of in its, you know,
00:30:32
Speaker
in the depth of its existential question. Right. Yeah, good. So it's in these rhyming couplets mostly, although at one point we get a triplet, which is interesting. But to just take that first couplet as a way maybe to move into the poem now, Margaret, are you grieving over Golden Grove unleaving?
00:30:52
Speaker
Unleaving is like a weird invention. I mean, he just, unleaving one wood leaf meal, it does several things there. It rhymes with grieving. It provides an image for quote, loss of leaves. Right. Unleaving. It also suggests the homonym of to leave. So the leaves are leaving. It does so, so much. And then you get that kind of fun,
00:31:20
Speaker
Anglo-Saxony just rhyme of pure repetition leaves like the things of man you with your fresh thoughts care for, can you? It's just interesting that it starts with two questions, right? It's almost like it's putting up, it's figurative, it's putting up the sort of questions it will explore or substantiate by the rest of the, by the end, right? Which is sort of interesting.
00:31:43
Speaker
I guess so, yeah. And I guess, yeah, it is interesting that these are in some very real way rhetorical questions because Margaret can't answer in the poem, right? And it seems like, you know, he follows his questions with this, ah, but I want to pause over the thing you, the work you were doing with that word, unleaving, just a moment longer. Because on the one hand, yeah, it is this like,
00:32:07
Speaker
non-construction, that you know what it means, it means, okay, when a tree loses its leaves, it's unleaving. But what's funny is the homonym, I think, that you were referring to, or the, yeah, this other sense in which you might take the word, sounds in a way almost paradoxically opposed to that meaning, right? So that you think,
00:32:35
Speaker
And it's sort of the pun of the word leave that does it, you know? I'm thinking of the expression, you know, make like a tree and leave. But right, because, sorry, just to spell it out, and then I want to hear you think about it. Unleaving, if you weren't talking about a tree, but you were talking about, you know, you might think of that as like someone not departing. Not leaving, yeah.
00:33:04
Speaker
But what's actually happening is she's crying as though she were being abandoned by something, maybe,
Exploration of 'Unleaving'
00:33:12
Speaker
right? As though she were being left. But calling it unleaving both sort of illustrates that and points in this totally opposite direction. I don't know. Well, I think it's so true. And then again, being that it's Hopkins, we sort of know that there has to be a reason for it.
00:33:33
Speaker
part of it is that in reality, the tree is going nowhere. It's still alive. It's dormant. It's a season, right? It's not, it's not leaving. And on the other hand, she's the one who's going to leave. I mean, I hate that we keep contemplating the last two lines existed before her. And that tree will exist when she's gone, you know? Yeah, always. These are the spiritual exercises of nature. They are
00:34:00
Speaker
continuous. And we have our quote unquote seasons too, but we feel in much more emotionally taxing ways about our seasons than nature seems to feel, which nature does not seem to worry about its ebbs and flows. And we
00:34:18
Speaker
are in a state of constant neurosis about, you know? Speak for yourself. I'm very relaxed, I'm sure. I think it's sort of already suggesting what's going to happen. And he does that in steps in this poem. Do you want to talk about more of those steps for us? Well, can I move on to the next few lines? Of course you can. This is your conversation. This is my conversation. OK, I feel empowered.
00:34:46
Speaker
Um, you know, I think one thing I'll say is that, so he's talking about nature's yearly departure in that, I'm leaving, um, that parallels and in fact, contrast man's inevitable end that just is an end. You don't die and then come back as far as we know. Or do you? I don't know. I mean, maybe very well. And I, and a conversation for a different podcast, but at least in Hopkins version, um, it feels like
00:35:16
Speaker
The end is rather the end. Sorry. The only reason I said that was because of what you had said about his religion earlier. And I don't know how that alters or changes. I mean, yes, I think that when I die, that's it. Yes. But a priest might think differently, no? Yes. Well, you know, in traditional Christian ideology, probably, you know, paradise, heaven, purgatory, that paradigm is sure. In Judaism, it's not. Yeah. And then, you know, but
00:35:45
Speaker
But the reincarnational aspect, I'm not sure, but in any case, I think leaves like the things of man you with your fresh thoughts care for, can you? So it's interesting that the child's thoughts are fresh.
Margaret's Maturity and Perception Change
00:36:02
Speaker
They're fleetingly fresh because at some point they're going to be tarnished by age and experience and exposure to the world. And then you won't mourn them.
00:36:13
Speaker
she won't, right? So as the heart grows older, it will come to such sites colder by and by, nor spare a sigh, the worlds of Wanwood leaf meal lie. So worlds of Wanwood leaf meal. And this is just delightful. I mean, there's something so textural and kind of kinesthetic about the way Hopkins uses words. And it's almost like he's taking the charge of
00:36:39
Speaker
the Gospel of John that says world as word, you know? It is not. I mean, he is coining terms left, right, and center. One would leaf meal lie. And so she will be presumably amidst an entire forest, an entire world of one would leaf meal. Right. You think this one tree losing its leaves is bad. Yeah. And do not even spare a sigh for it by the time she's an adult. She'll be so used to it.
00:37:06
Speaker
Her heart will no longer have the kind of fresh emotional response to this as it would, as an adult would, right? Adults lose that, in some ways, sympathetic urgency or empathy for the natural world. So he's acknowledging that, that in fact, that tarnishing comes in how she will emotionally react to the world and to the damage.
00:37:32
Speaker
Right, and this really for me cinches the thing you were saying earlier in this conversation about the spring in the poem being her, or her as a child, because what that sort of intimates is her own seasons turning. But the other thing I wanted to say when you were talking about the trees, the tree likely outliving Margaret,
00:38:03
Speaker
Golden Grove is that the error she's making is in thinking that its annual cycle is a life cycle, which instead, as you refer to, it's not death, it's dormancy. Yes, yes, yes. But for her, it seems like the poem is suggesting humans don't age in that way. It seems like she's gonna have one of each season.
00:38:33
Speaker
Yes. She's in her spring right now. She's going to get one of them.
00:38:41
Speaker
Yes, yes. And by the time, you know, she makes her way through her summer, which I don't know what that would be, but like young adults, you know, whatever the prime of her life, you know, autumn is now middle age or something and, you know,
Human Life as a Cycle of Seasons
00:38:59
Speaker
winter. Right. By the time she gets there, it's not it's not going to come around again for her, at least. Right. And her mind will never be restored to that.
00:39:11
Speaker
original feeling, let's say, for the world. Right. And I think that's part of what he's grieving in this, right? Ah, which is such a kind of spoken affect of the poem. And it's class again, it's performative. But so is even having things like one would leaf meal and all of the kind of sonic play, he's really interested in the materiality of language. And you feel that so keenly.
00:39:35
Speaker
as you read. So it's not just about telling this kind of fable-ish little tale of Margaret and the tree, right? It's so much about the pleasure of the language. And in that way, it's sort of amazing because it is excessive. I mean, he is someone who is so excessive in the sound patterning. But there's also a kind of restraint. I think your point about the control is sort of interesting there. And again, maybe to
00:40:03
Speaker
another way of thinking about that is the kind of meditative aspect of the poem and the momentum building aspect of the poem. The sound kind of builds a sense of momentum, but line by line, it's thinking. It's a poem thinking about thinking or thinking about experience and reaction. So yeah, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say that it's a poem that
00:40:28
Speaker
I don't know that I, I don't know that I can, what I can point to that will, um, you know, warrant the claim that I'm about to make, but, um, it's a poem that seems to like it's, it's a poem that's over full in a way, right? That's sort of insisting. Um, so I'm hearing it sort of in the way that it rhymes in the kind of fullness of these rhymes. Um,
00:40:58
Speaker
What I'm thinking about, inspired by your way of talking about the poem, Maya, is
00:41:09
Speaker
The poet is delivering a message here. It's a didactic poem in a way. And that might sound like denigration because we're not meant to like didacticism in poetry, but I love this poem. And I think it's a poem that has the rhetorical pose of a teacher speaking.
00:41:33
Speaker
It also seems funny to me, now that I named dates at the beginning of the conversation, the poet sounds older than in his mid-30s to me. He sounds sort of world weary and wise or something. It's so funny to think that among the Victorians, he fit in not at all. This is to you so strange actually for his period, but keep going.
00:41:55
Speaker
Yeah, sorry. So one could, at great sort of violence to the poem, paraphrase its wisdom, right? And what I'm wondering is if in its sort of rhetorical manner, in the kind of fullness and richness of its treatment of language,
00:42:19
Speaker
it's actually doing something sort of in a countervailing spirit to the sort of directness of the, I mean, so to put it simply, you know, this girl is crying because the tree is losing its leaves and the poet is saying, ah, you know, you don't, you know, it's don't worry about the tree, worry about yourself, right? You know,
00:42:45
Speaker
But somehow in the language of the poem itself, it's like the poet is more like Margaret than he cares to admit, or is wanting to sort of preserve. I think of that line from the letter that Keats wrote to Shelley, where he tells him to load every rift with ore.
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah, so good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is also a funny kind of like, you know, Keith's giving advice to Shelley seems like it's a it was a funny thing for him to have done. But that advice to load every rift with or Hopkins seems like to have taken that advice in this poem, he's loading every rift with or like, he's filling it all in. And
00:43:30
Speaker
You know, that seems not to put a kind of ironic distance between him and the addressee of the poem, but to sort of be speaking in her spirit somehow. I like that, speaking in her spirit. Yeah, I mean, again, it's strange and I think didactic is right. It's almost like there's this epistemological conversation and a kind of religious conversation all happening in the poem, but it's
00:43:58
Speaker
It is that sonic dilation, the string of vowels, the wand, the leaf meal, that's so, again, almost, he's creating a palette, a vowel palette that creates connective tissue in the poem and that makes it so much more than what it might
00:44:16
Speaker
what it might have been, which is, as you say, this kind of like little moral lesson vignette, right? Rather than that, because of all this stuff that is so much a signature of Hopkins' style, it is pulsing with life. I mean, I think he is, again, I think poets who really like him return to him because there's something forceful
00:44:39
Speaker
in poems that feel so much on the side of life, even in something like the terrible songs, even in the poems he wrote in the midst of severe depressive episodes. There's no for life in them.
00:44:51
Speaker
I love what you say about the idea of a palette or something like a sonic palette. And we've talked a bit about rhyme already. So it's a poem that's in rhyming couplets, as I said, except that there's a triplet in it. So in the middle, roughly, or exactly, of the poem, we get, rather than two lines that rhyme a rhyming couplet, we get three lines in a row that rhyme.
00:45:21
Speaker
Psi, lie, why. It strikes me that were that not the case where the poem just in couplets, the poem would be sonnet length.
00:45:31
Speaker
It would be, it's just one line per triplet of a sonnet. Yeah. Right. So, so there must be something, um, significant about the moment where we move from couplet to triplet and why it happens there. You know, sonnets often have, um, you know, not the sonnet doesn't just have 14 lines, right? A sonnet often has a kind of turn in it, you know, the Volta and the Italian tradition.
00:45:58
Speaker
or a rhyming couplet at the end of an Elizabethan sonnet that it's another kind of turn. So is that triplet doing sort of Volta-like work or why? What do you do with the triplet? I think absolutely that the line, and yet you will weep and know why, it's such a well-executed moment of clarity, right? We've had all of these beautiful images that preceded it. It's a compressed declarative, which I think also matters. It draws our attention back in.
00:46:27
Speaker
Um, so I think, and it's sort of, it reads as the only unstopped line as well. So I, I do believe it's functioning as a Volta would there actually. Um, and it's, it's so interesting, even what it's saying is kind of spooky on first read a weep and know why. So, so in some ways.
Evolution of Understanding Tears
00:46:50
Speaker
he's arguing she's weeping and thinks she knows why she's weeping, but she doesn't really know why she's weeping. And by the time you're weeping, again, you will know why you're weeping. Oh, that's so wonderful. So when you cry as a child, because, well, I don't know. In this case, the leaves are falling from your favorite tree, but we can think of a child crying because
00:47:11
Speaker
some cute animal died in a movie or whatever it is, whatever sort of like, you know what I mean, though, kind of familiarized version of experience of death that a child encounters. Yes, yes. That is crying without knowing why you're crying. It's almost you think, you know, but you don't iceberg is what you're really experiencing here. You know, it's a symbol of the fall that you're experiencing. It's not you don't even know you're responding to the symbol, not to the greater underlying message, you know,
00:47:40
Speaker
That's sort of what he's intimating is that by, and he's also saying again, by the time that you're older, none of this will affect you. None of this perceived loss will hurt you, but you will still be weeping. And you're going to know why you're weeping in a way that- It won't be over a tree. It'll be- Yes. He's almost, the premise of the poem is that he's correctly guessed what upset her and has sort of explained now to her what
00:48:09
Speaker
what's actually beneath this. Because again, it's the sense of, you know, it's why children cry when their parents leave the room, they think they're never going to come back, right? They don't have a sense yet of how the cyclical nature of loss. And at some point, we become so accustomed with loss that crying feels unnecessary or superfluous, which is not there yet, you know,
00:48:34
Speaker
She hasn't mastered the art as Bishop might say. And she will. And maybe it's the case that, you know, I said earlier that a human life doesn't have
00:48:53
Speaker
seasons in the same way that a tree does, because it has them once, let's say. But a poem isn't a human life. And a poem, this poem does have a kind of recurring rhythm, you know, that the rhyme produces in a way, right? So like, that's not just one turn around the globe, that's, or around the sun, that's, you know, many, you know, seven or something.
00:49:24
Speaker
So he's just gotten done telling her that when she's older, she's not going to care so much about the trees losing their leaves, but she will, but she will weep and know why. She will have internalized the source of her own grief and it won't be what she thought it was. It won't be that the golden leaves have fallen. And again, the next four lines, now no matter child, the name Sorrow Springs are the same is sort of
00:49:50
Speaker
Again, we get that lovely echo to the title of spring and fall with the springs there and the lovely alliteration hard-heard ghost guest in the next It's sort of again, it's saying that all Pain all grief shares one original source, right? It's all an iteration of the same fact
00:50:14
Speaker
of mortality, it's all coming from the same place. So all loss is coming from the same, again, it shares the same spring. So even though he, the poet, has been at pains to distinguish the kind of trivial tears over the tree from the tears whose source he doesn't actually identify, but we can all guess at the kind of thing that would prompt it like a
00:50:45
Speaker
death of a loved one, something like that, right? And then ultimately, of course, her own death and her own mortality. After he's made that distinction, he's sort of dismissing his own distinction. All sorrow springs are the same. What do you make of the fact that, I mean, you alluded to this way back earlier when I asked you about the poem's title, but now we've gotten to the moment that the word spring
00:51:12
Speaker
appearing in the poem here. It's doing so in a totally different linguistic register from the seasonal one, I think. These are springs in the sense of origins, like a stream or something, the place sorrow streams forth from.
00:51:31
Speaker
Um, but yeah, I don't know. Is that, um, do you have any thoughts about the words appearance here? Because, you know, I think, again, he's a poet who so paints with language and I think that's really very much a part of his sort of arts poetic. So even having that lines, I can't not think that there's,
00:51:52
Speaker
emphasis on the alliteration. So the sorrow springs and same there are working so beautifully together. And creating kind of a synesthetic link between feeling and hearing, right? The sound sense of the line. So I do think it's a nod to the title and also that he's thinking of spring is exactly what he means. I mean, I guess you could go sorrow sources are the same, or springs sources would be to beat springs is one.
00:52:22
Speaker
Most of these lines are about eight or seven beats per line. They're not following a complete pattern. The syllables, but for accents or something. I see it as part of that, and springs feels just like the mojus to me. It feels exactly like what he means. It still feels to me also
00:52:50
Speaker
like a reference to Eden, like the rivers of people or something. I mean, yeah, that might be, you know, I feel that too when Normouth had, No Normind expressed what Hart heard of ghost guest. You know, I think the ghost is such an important part of the tripartite. There's a sense here that I don't think we're over reading into it whenever we speak kind of religious allusions.
00:53:16
Speaker
that are possible with Hopkins, I think they're there, you know. Yeah, surely not. Surely not over reading to hear something about the Holy Ghost there, but ghosts might just mean what, in a simple, like soul or spirit. Yes, what the heart heard and the ghost guessed. Yeah. And that's a weirdly inverted sentence, which maybe we should just try to unstring, first of all. So, your mouth had...
00:53:42
Speaker
No nor mind expressed. So I think what he's saying, though he's saying it obviously in a much more interesting way than what I'm about to say, but a paraphrase can be useful even if you want to dismiss it afterwards. Nobody has ever said or thought the thing that somehow in your feeling or your soul you've understood. In other words, there are things that we get without having the words for.
00:54:10
Speaker
Exactly. And I think it's so important that it's heart hears rather than heart feels, right? Oh, say more about that. This is the alliteration, but I don't think he's just randomly landed there. I think it's what you're saying. It's something that one almost needs to be quiet to hear in the heart, to know what this is, right?
00:54:30
Speaker
And the ghost guest, I mean, again, the ghost is almost like a flicker of a former life somehow. It's not quite clear. And again, this is all about
00:54:42
Speaker
unanswerability in some ways. There's something deeply mysterious too about this arc. So that while it seems to end on a place of he is telling her what she will feel and he is telling her that this is the grief that we all have, there are still always questions about death.
Questing Nature of the Poem
00:55:01
Speaker
There are questions about the afterlife. This isn't
00:55:05
Speaker
It's never quite done, right? And so I think that's part of the kind of questing aspect of the poem.
00:55:14
Speaker
Yeah, questing is a really nice word for it. Ghost, guest, I guess there's something about the kind of the metaphorical sense in which a guess is like a flicker of thought, you know, that draws out through force of that alliteration, the flickering nature of the ghost as a kind of version of
00:55:42
Speaker
the self for the soul or something like that. That's, um, yeah, I had not, I had not thought of that until you, um, until you suggested that. Okay, good. Yeah. That's the best kind of thoughts I have. Um, yeah. Okay. So now we're at the end. It is the, it is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret you mourned for. Um,
00:56:13
Speaker
It is the blight man was born for. He's upending a more conventional thought that a person might've had or talk to us about that final couplet, Maya.
Insight into Human Grief in Final Couplet
00:56:28
Speaker
I mean, it's the great insight and it's in some ways the construction of it's so interesting.
00:56:40
Speaker
in that it begins, each line begins, it is, and ends in four. So there's a very kind of weird insistence to it and conclusionary aspect to it. Like it really feels like it's tying itself up. And in essence, he recognizes what she's been mourning this whole time where he's suggesting to her that what she's been mourning this
00:57:03
Speaker
whole time is her own mortality is the sense that she cannot stay and enjoy. And of course, this is perhaps outside the realm of what, what he's actually saying in the poem, but she must have enjoyed the golden grove that is now I'm leaving. So you cannot stick around and enjoy all of it. Pleasure has to fade, you have to die.
00:57:23
Speaker
in every minor loss you mourn, your mourning, your eventual end. Because otherwise there'd be infinite time to continue gaining and losing, right? Yeah. It's not that you can't stick around and enjoy all of it. You can't stick around and enjoy any of it. Yeah. So I'm so interested in
00:57:48
Speaker
The force, how should I put this? The work that's done in the last line by using her name in that way, rather than saying, you know, so the worst version of the same thought would be, it is yourself, you mourn for, right? It is Margaret you mourn for, somehow makes, well, now in the same line, we have a you and a Margaret, which theoretically are the same,
00:58:17
Speaker
refer to the same entity, but sound very different. It's like the U has been dislocated somehow from this Margaret, you know? It's a performance again. This is part of what I feel so much of this poem is an experience. And when you reach that final line,
00:58:37
Speaker
You know, because the insight might otherwise be performed in a very kind of trite manner. I mean, I don't want any one lecturing me on why I'm grieving and the fact that every grief is my... I'd be quite irritated, in fact, if someone... Right. I was going to say, it's a sort of an irritating thing that the poem is doing, right?
00:58:55
Speaker
Right. And so there's somehow though, that her the appearance of her name, again, sort of cements the wisdom that is actually the beating heart of this. I mean, I don't get the sense that this is someone being didactic for the sake of being didactic, but rather that this is a lesson they're struggling with themselves. That this is something that is inherently beautiful, even the grief is beautiful.
00:59:18
Speaker
and that it is the blight that man was born for, is not quite as depressing as it might be. It is sort of, this is the blight. This is the blight that you are born for. This is, it is Margaret you're mourning for. I mean, it's really the sense that it's okay. This is what it was, this is it. This is what it's meant. Everything is doing what it's meant to do in a good way, you know? And there's something haunting about the inclusion of the name.
00:59:47
Speaker
If it were just about delivering a lesson, it would be it is yourself you mourn for and then that would implicate every reader. There's something more impactful about having it go back to Margaret, right?
01:00:00
Speaker
Yeah, where it began, the first word of the poem, right? I looked up the name, it means Pearl in the Bible or in its origins, the name Margaret in various linguistic traditions, I think means something like Pearl.
01:00:21
Speaker
I don't know if Hopkins would have likely to have cared about that or thought about it, maybe. It's interesting that one of the most sort of interesting medieval texts is the Pearl poem that's written at Gawain, the same Gawain and the Green Knight writer. And that is a deeply religious text about a man who loses his daughter Pearl.
01:00:45
Speaker
And goes sort of like into this weird life and she's like a beautiful adolescent woman now She's not a child anymore and she's basically telling her dad to stop mourning her because well, so that sounds absolutely apt Yeah, she's in the she's with Christ now. She's like one of Christ's ladies, you know, like in the Like stop mourning. It's not good
01:01:04
Speaker
And that's a horrible summary of the Pearl poem. It's an amazing poem, but- Sure. It's a useful summary. It used to occur to me, but in any case, I think probably that stretch, but I didn't know that Margaret was Pearl in the- I don't think that's a stretch. I think that must be exactly right. Yeah. And, well, you know, the rhyme on, you know, born and mourn. Well, it's not a rhyme.
01:01:33
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, born and mourn. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, I guess I wonder also, and this is this now probably is pushing things too far in the name, Margaret, you get some of the sounds of Gerard Manley Hopkins name, right? The G's and the M's and the R's. That's interesting.
01:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Put that up. I'm gonna put that in the show notes. I'll put a whole theory on. I was just gonna say with the born, born thing, I think Christopher Ricks has this amazing line about metaphor, or rhyme being a form of metaphor, because it's a finding and a reminding. And in some ways, it's a sonic metaphor, which is so interesting. And so the born
01:02:25
Speaker
mourn thing is kind of tied into that. But by all means, continue with your theory. No, no, no. You heard it. That was it. You just did a conspiracy theory. Okay, fine. Well, no, I mean, just sorry, just that, you know, so sorry. So the theory would go something like... Yes.
01:02:46
Speaker
little girl, you're crying over the tree. What you're really crying over is yourself. But then stand one level back from that. And what it is is, you know, poet, you're not addressing Margaret, you're addressing yourself. Yes. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. So just as she is looking at the tree, but but from from the poet's point of view, actually not thinking about that's not the right word, but
01:03:17
Speaker
guessing something about herself. The poet only seems to be addressing Margaret. Margaret is like the tree for him. And what he's actually mourning for is Gerard Manley Hopkins or something like that.
01:03:35
Speaker
Which is possibly the case. I've not researched to know whether this was to a real child or not. It might be sort of the vehicle. Yeah, I think he says, I think I saw it just in the, I mean, it's not something I know, except that it was in the notes of my edition that there's a letter in which he says it's an invented situation. Who knows if that's to be trusted or not.
01:03:59
Speaker
All right. Well, this was this was such a beautiful conversation, Maya, and I want to thank you for it. I think I think maybe we should hear the poem one more time as a way out. Do you want to read it again? Would you like to read it? Well, of course I would like to read it, but you're the guest. I want to share the bounty on this, at all means, and think and just to say again, thank you so much for having me on. I enjoyed this tremendously.
01:04:25
Speaker
Oh, of course, thank you, the pleasure is all mine. Okay, spring and fall to a young child. Margaret, are you grieving over Golden Grove, unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you with your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
01:04:48
Speaker
Ah, as the heart grows older, it will come to such sights colder by and by, nor spare a sigh though worlds of one would leaf me a lie. And yet you will weep and know why. Now, no matter, child, the name, Sorrow's springs are the same.
01:05:13
Speaker
Normouth had, no nor mind, expressed what heart heard of, ghosts guessed. It is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret you mourn for." I love that poem. I love that poem. And I love talking to you. Listeners, thank you for listening. Thank you for experiencing this poem with us.
01:05:41
Speaker
Can't wait to share more of these conversations. We'll have more coming up soon. I wish everyone a happy spring. My Persian friends and family out there, happy Nooruz. And a new day for all of us. Thanks, Maya. Thank you so much.