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 heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the
blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
A common interpretation of this poem runs along the lines of the decline from spring to fall - Margaret is seen as unconsiously grieving for her own eventual decline from youth into old age and death. However, this interpretation ignores in my opinion the couplet which is central to the poem as well as its meaning: "Ah! as the heart grows older / It will come to such sights colder". Unless one considers this couplet pivotal to the meaning, it just sits there being aphorismic and rather patronising for no apparent reason.
It has been my opinion that what Hopkins, throug his Margaret, is mourning not the decline of the body but the decline of the mind - the dulling of youth's acute sensibilities, the loss of that instinctive and unrationalised connection to nature. The "blight" in the poem is not the blight of death but of indifference.