Natalie Merchant and Gerard Manley Hopkins

A couple of weeks ago, on Morning Edition with NPR, I heard an interview with the singer/songwriter Natalie Merchant about a new album she created for young children. In the interview she spoke about the album as a whole, but one song she mentioned stood out among the rest. She said that she used the poem, Spring and Fall: to a young child by Gerard Manley Hopkins as one of the songs on the album. The music she put to the poem by Hopkins is very appropriate; slow, melancholy, and sobering. The poem is about an adult trying to explain death to a young child. Visit Natalie Merchant's website to listen to a sample.

Spring and Fall: to a young child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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 héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.