Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

“God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)

One of Hopkins’s most famous and most quoted poems, “God’s Grandeur” was composed a few years before “Spring and Fall.” The similarities and differences between the two poems are worth noting: both use Hopkins’s characteristic vivid sensorial imagery, sprung rhythm, alliteration, and assonance. The differences are tonal and thematic: while “Spring and Fall” is melancholy and meditative, “God’s Grandeur” is more dynamic, celebrating natural beauty as “charged” with the grandeur of God. The striking tonal variation between the two poems illustrates Hopkins’s considerable poetic range.

“Mirrors of Life and Death” by Christina Rossetti (1877)

Rossetti was one of the older contemporary poets who Hopkins greatly admired for her rhythmic, enigmatic poetry, as well as her religious and philosophical themes. “Mirrors of Life and Death,” considered an influence behind “Spring and Fall” contains similar themes of mortality and life’s impermanence. Both poems are written in simple, evocative language and rhyming short lines but differ vastly in poetic technique. A comparative analysis of the two is very useful in studying how Rossetti influenced Hopkins, and how radically Hopkins’s technique differed from other poets of the Victorian age.

“The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop (1946)