Audiobook · read by volunteers
Spring and Fall
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
Read by Alan Davis Drake (1945-2010), Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Betsie Bush, Dodge Reid, Diyan, JemmaBlythe, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Lizzie Driver, Lisa Stahley, Mitchell Ho · 11 chapters · 12 min
About the book
Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving? Gerard Manley Hopkins's Spring and Fall is a poem addressed to a young child who weeps as she watches leaves fall from the trees. It is brief and tender, and it carries a grave lesson: the sorrow she feels now is the sorrow of mortality itself, and it is for herself that she mourns. Hopkins's distinctive rhythms and his fresh, close-packed language give the poem its unmistakable music. In this LibriVox collection eleven volunteers each record the poem, so that you can hear it eleven times in different voices. The whole set lasts about twelve minutes and shows how a short poem can change with each reader. The same lines, eleven voices, and a feeling that grows with every hearing.
Introduction
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest. He wrote poems for most of his adult life, but few were published while he lived, and his work first reached a wide audience in 1918, when his friend Robert Bridges issued the first collection. His technique, which he called sprung rhythm, and his richly compounded vocabulary changed the course of English poetry. He had destroyed his early verse when he entered the Society of Jesus, and he returned to poetry only years later with The Wreck of the Deutschland.
Spring and Fall is one of his shorter and best-loved poems. Its subtitle, to a young child, indicates that the speaker is addressing a child, and it expresses a mixture of sympathy and wisdom. The poem was written in 1880. It moves from a simple scene, a child mourning for falling leaves, to a deeper reflection on human mortality, in a few swift lines.
This recording comes from a LibriVox weekly poetry project, the week of 12 November 2006. There are eleven versions, read by different volunteers, among them Alan Davis Drake, Annie Coleman Rothenberg and Betsie Bush, and the complete collection lasts about twelve minutes. Hearing the poem several times in a row helps the listener notice details of rhythm and meaning that a single reading might hide. It is an ideal introduction to Hopkins and to the pleasures of poetry read aloud. It is brief enough to hear several times over, and each hearing reveals something new.
Public domain
Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text