After spending nine months in their warm and cozy home, babies enter the world and face a stunning but terrifying reality. It's uncertain how long their innocence will remain intact. The human experience gradually erodes the purity of innocence, much like the leaves are stripped from trees by cool winds in Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem Spring and Fall.
The main theme of the poem is the interplay between innocence and experience. The opening lines, "Margaret are you grieving Over Goldenrod unleavened Leaves Like the things of man, you with your fresh thoughts care for, can you?", depict Margaret's sorrow over the fallen leaves of autumn. Her concern for even small matters like the leaves falling reflects her innocent perspective, though as the poem develops, this childish viewpoint evolves into one of experience.
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Hopkins conveys that as Margaret grows up, her emotional response to nature will change. In the poem, he writes "Ah! As the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder by and by, nor spare a sigh" implying that Margaret won't feel sad when the trees shed their leaves due to her experience and loss of innocence. Furthermore, in the last two lines of Spring and Fall, Hopkins suggests that the sources of sadness are ubiquitous and remain constant for individuals across all ages.
The poem concludes with the words, "Margaret, it is Margaret you mourn for; it is the blight man was born for." Although tragic, the ending accurately depicts the loss of innocence.
Both "Spring and Fall" and George Rowel's "Shooting an Elephant" involve themes of death. In his story, George remarks that the children had witnessed somethin
they should not have, saying, "Evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud" (823). Similarly, Margaret and the children in the former also contemplate death, with the latter actually coming face-to-face with a dead body.
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