Here is a link to the poem Spring by Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Spring is a really special time in our lives. Isn’t it beautiful when the countryside starts to come alive again after a cold winter? This poem starts as a celebration of the beauty and joy of Spring but it also poses an important question to God that is bothering the poet.

Gerald Manley Hopkins was a British poet writing during the mid-to-late 1800s. He was a religious man who eventually became a Jesuit priest, a sub-branch of the Roman Catholic church. In some ways, this poem can be seen as a praise-poem but it also contains a request to Christ (Jesus) to protect young people before they sin.

Interestingly, this poem is also a sonnet which means that it is made up of 14 lines. However, its structure is a bit different from a Shakespearean sonnet as we saw in ‘Sonnet 18’. This sonnet has a first stanza that consists of 8 lines known as the octet (or octave) in which the poet speaks about the beauty of spring. In the second stanza of six lines known as the sestet, the poet changes his perspective to speak directly to Christ. He asks about the meaning behind this natural beauty and he asks Christ to protect innocent children. This type of sonnet is known as an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and it has a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA in the octet and CDCDCD in the sestet.

Hopkins’ poetry is famous for its richness, the imagery, the sounds of the words. Even if you don’t understand everything, you can still enjoy just how vivid and bright the language is.

The poem starts off very clearly with the speaker declaring that there is nothing as beautiful as spring. He then goes on to present some imagery of what he finds so beautiful about spring. His emphasis here is on movement, of things that are growing and alive. We might not like ‘weeds’ much, but the speaker sees them as growing in ‘wheels’ – living circles – that are shooting up, ‘Shoot long and lovely and lush’. The poet uses both alliteration and assonance to draw our attention to the rich growth of the weeds. There is alliteration in the repetition of the ‘w’ in ‘weeds’ and ‘wheels’ but also the ‘l’ in ‘long’, ‘lush’ and ‘lovely. These sounds lengthen the words and the assonance in the vowel sounds ‘ee’ in ‘weeds’ and ‘wheels’ draws them out even further. To add to this, Hopkins repeats ‘and’ between ‘long’, ‘lush’ and ‘lovely’. This truly gives the reader a sense of the growth of life in spring.

Hopkins goes on to compare ‘Thrush’s eggs’ to ‘little low heavens’. Is it in this metaphor that we start to see the links to religion in this sonnet? A thrush is a type of bird which loves to sing as the weather starts to warm up. Here, the speaker compares the egg to ‘low little heavens’ because the bird’s eggs are blue in colour, the same as the blue sky on a spring day.

He continues with the idea of the thrush as he introduces the sense of sound as we ‘listen’ to the bird singing. ‘Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring / The ear,’. So this means that the sound of the singing echoes off the woods ‘timber’ of the trees. Timber is also a homonym for ‘timbre’ which means the quality of a musical sound. The sound helps to ‘rinse’ and ‘wring’ the ears as if the birdsong is cleaning out our ears, rejuvenating them after the winter. ‘it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;’ here he uses a simile comparing the bird’s song to lightening, which flashes down as a living force. Interesting that in this image lightening is looked at in a positive way.

The last few lines of the octet almost list other beautiful things of spring. He repeats ‘The’ as he looks at these elements. The ‘glassy peartree’, a sparkling fruit-bearing tree, is full blooming with leaves and blossoms. Its growth is so spectacular that it almost seems to touch, ‘the descending blue’. Again, this relates to the beautiful blue sky but it also ties into the idea of a religious heaven reaching down. Again, movement is seen in ‘that blue is all in a rush’ but the alliteration with ‘richness’ also ties into the wonderful rich growth of nature during spring. The ‘r’ sound is rolling with movement and life.

The final line brings us closer to religion with the mention of ‘the racing lambs too have fair their fling.’ Lambs are associated with springtime but also to Christ. Jesus himself is referenced in the Bible as ‘the Lamb of God’. These lambs are enjoying being able to ‘fling’, to run around the fields. The alliteration of ‘f’ in ‘fair’ and ‘fling’ is a gentle sound associated with their innocence and joy as they move around.

As is usual in a Petrarchan sonnet, the focus of the poem shifts at the start of the sestet (and, in this case, the second stanza). This change is highlighted by the question that the poet directs to Christ. ‘What is all this juice and all this joy?’ ‘Juice’ here means aliveness, things that are alive with blood, sap etc.; the things that give life. Hopkins uses alliteration again here to ask Christ what the point of all this life is? Is it ‘A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning / in Eden garden.’? ‘Strain’ in this context means ‘trace’. In other words, is this a trace of what it was like in the Biblical Garden of Eden before sin was introduced? The almost confused words of ‘Have, get, before it cloy, / Before it cloud’ shows the speaker’s concern about the loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden. The ‘cloy’ and the ‘cloud’ represents the sickness and darkness of sin that was introduced to this innocent place. In Biblical terms, the Garden of Eden was a paradise first inhabited by Adam and Eve, the first humans created by God. Eventually, they chose to sin and humans were thrown out of paradise and have continued to sin ever since. The hard ‘C’ sounds of the alliteration emphasises the collapse of an innocent world.

It’s at this point of the sonnet that the speaker begs God to save ‘Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy’ despite humans being ‘sour with sinning’. ‘Mayday’ is the first day of spring and, in these lines, it represents the innocence of children, boys and girls. The poet asks Christ, ‘Most, O maid’s child’ (Jesus was once the child to Mary – ‘maid’ meaning young woman) to choose to rescue them from sin as they are ‘worthy the winning’. It’s worth saving them – by bringing them to God at an early age – so that they can be protected from sinning.

The religious nature becomes really apparent in the sestet. As the poet celebrates the beautiful, life-affirming cleansing innocence of nature in Spring, he also begs God to save the young and innocent from a life of sin.