[REVISITING] Gerard Manley Hopkins at Your Thanksgiving Table
His poem perfectly captures this sad, happy, dreary, delicious time of year. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
BACK IN THE LAND BEFORE TIME, this substack had several hundred hardy subscribers who helped me through the early times of “why the hell am I doing this?” Now there are 2,600 of you, many of whom actually pay for the privilege of reading this. Yeah, it astonishes me, too. And, I’m grateful. Here’s a post only a few of you saw, from Thanksgiving a year ago. So why not throw the circle wider, and invite all of you delightful new people to join us at the R2E buffet? I hope your holiday tables are adorned with the beast of your dreams (animal or vegetable), and I apologize to those of you who look at that gathering around the very first Thanksgiving table, and want to shout at the native people there, “Run for your lives.” History is complicated, ain’t it? Onward into the holiday madhouse!
IN 1880, GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS wrote “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.” It was one of the first poems I ever memorized. It captures this autumn in all of its glory, and gloom.
Hopkins wrote:
Margaret, are you gríeving
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 wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s spríngs 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.
Apropos of nothing, did you know that an anagram for "Peter Moore" is "Emperor Toe"?
Ah for the dappled