Hopkins the Romantic? The Question of Empathy in "Spring and Fall"

When first reading Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring and Fall," one is struck by the speaker's tone of empathic tenderness towards the "young child" he addresses, whose own feeling of empathy is the subject matter of his address. Turning to Margaret in her grief over dying autumn leaves, the speaker admiringly wonders at the innocent child's ability to feel for decaying nature as she would for things human: "Leaves, like the things of man, you / With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?"¹ He then goes on to express his compassion for her, who is bound to lose her enabling innocence as soon as she realizes that the seasonal fall she bemoans symbolizes the Fall. "Ah, as the heart grows older," the speaker sighs, it will lose its generosity towards nature—a generosity allowed by ignorance of human mortality, which nature, in its decay, reflects to Margaret without her knowing it. But for all the tenderness praised and expressed in it, the poem in effect challenges both Margaret's empathy and the speaker's. While pointing, however gently, to the child's misplaced emotion, the speaker's words also suggest the limited emotional capacity of adult hearts. "Ah, as the heart grows older," sighs the speaker, it will not "spare a sigh," let alone grieve, for "sights [much] colder." The speaker's paradoxical sigh epitomizes the rhetoric of "Spring and Fall," which challenges only to reaffirm the human capacity for empathy by means of a teasing tension between linguistic statement and performance.

At the end of "Spring and Fall," the speaker tells Margaret what she really mourns for while she believes she is grieving "over Goldengrove unleaving." The truth he reveals to her is one which, for all her innocence, or, as a Romantic would argue, precisely because of it, she intuitively feels.² What no "mouth had, no nor mind, expressed," Margaret's "heart heard of" and her "ghost," or soul, "guessed," namely, that "It is the blight man was born for," that "It is Margaret [she] mourn[s] for." While possibly modifying the meaning of the speaker's earlier question concerning Margaret's grief, this statement positively contradicts what directly precedes it. The speaker's naming of the heart's and the soul's intimations of mortality follows his claim that name does not really matter here, or now, at least. "Now no matter, child, the name," he says, as "Sorrow's springs are the same" anyway, and/or because there is no point precipitating the child's painful fall from innocence. The gap between what the speaker says and what he does in translating the heart's intuition into words puts in question his status as well as his position in the poem. One wonders whether he has changed his mind in one way or another, and if so, why? Has a selfish desire to follow his argument to the bitter end overtaken his presumed empathic wish to protect Margaret from it? And if, as Donna Richardson sees it, his unwavering intention is to prepare the child for her impending fall out of innocence (p. 166), how is one to understand his apparently inconsistent position in relation to language (that is, the matter of naming)? Whatever the answers to these questions, the inconsistency that raises them focuses the reader's attention on questions of empathy and language which lie at the thematic center of the poem, as well as on the speaker himself. The latter's unclear position encourages one to follow Paul Doherty in regarding him as a character in a dramatic monologue.³ By such a reading, it is the speaker's experience, not Margaret's, that the poem primarily engages, giving access to its meaning through the ironic gap between the speaker's and the poet's different points of view. The illogical turn in the speaker's monologue suggests his undergoing a change of heart that is neither rational nor fully acknowledged by him. As to the nature and meaning of that change, one is led to believe that they have to do...