This is actually a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) titled Spring and Fall. I went to my AP English teacher asking for some extra credit and he gave me this and asked me to write an essay on it. I wasn't quite sure what to do at first but then, with some discussion with my teacher, I managed to analyze it and I found it to contain a wonderful meaning.
To a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
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
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
I found this so interesting because in the end, Margaret is mourning because she realize that she will someday lose this fatherly figure to death and that she will die as well. Her only hope is her faith in God and some form of afterlife, in which we all should have faith.
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