Worlds of wanwood are certainly lying leafmeal over every path here. This is what I saw as I walked out my door early enough that my good neighbors had not yet had a chance to clear the leaves from yards and walks. We’ve had a lovely Indian Summer here this week. The skies have been (mostly) clear and the temperatures in the balmy seventies. They tell us that there’s a cold front coming in and the winds have picked strongly enough to toss the branches in every direction and steal most of the leaves from our trees.
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 & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.Gerard Manley Hopkins
An excellent poem and one of my life favorites.
And now here’s a movable type formatting hint on something that, until I discovered it, really bugged me.
If you leave the “blockquote” open on an excerpt, it will drive everything below it into a stepped back look like you have here.
This is easy to do and hard to catch, but if you look at the source of the Hopkins excerpt, you’ll see that the closing blockquote doesn’t have the / in front of blockquote.
Add that and the page below loads as it should.
Yeah, me too. I think it’s one of the loveliest poems in the English language. And thanks for the tip. I’ve corrected it.