A child stands in an autumn wood, crying because the leaves are falling, and an adult asks her why. The question is kind, and slightly condescending. Hopkins's speaker begins by suggesting that Margaret's tears are a little out of proportion: surely a child with "fresh thoughts" can't truly care about leaves "like the things of man"? But the poem turns on its own gentle condescension. By the last line the speaker has changed his answer entirely. The child isn't crying about trees. "It is Margaret you mourn for."
That is the central idea, and it is a hard one. Margaret has no word for what she feels, but she has sensed that everything that lives will die, herself included. The poem is usually printed as "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child", and the double meaning of "fall" matters here. It means autumn, but it can also suggest the human fall, which the poem names as "the blight man was born for." Blight is a plant disease, so the word keeps the imagery of leaves while pointing at something larger: mortality as a condition we are all born into.
The speaker's view of adulthood is bleak, and the poem is honest about it. As the heart "grows older / It will come to such sights colder", meaning with less feeling, not just with less warmth. An adult will not "spare a sigh" even if "worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie." Yet the sorrow itself doesn't shrink with age. The line "And yet you will weep and know why" suggests that Margaret's later tears will be the same grief, now with a name attached. Ordinary adult hardness, the poem implies, is a way of coping with what the child feels openly.
Hopkins builds this out of words that feel freshly made. "Goldengrove" fuses two words into a single glowing place. "Unleaving" turns a noun into a verb, so that we watch the leaves leaving. "Wanwood" and "leafmeal" are stranger still. "Wan" means pale and sickly, and "leafmeal" seems modelled on "piecemeal", so the leaves come down bit by bit, like a slow crumbling. The compounds make the autumn wood look unfamiliar and a little unsettling, which is how it might look to a child suddenly aware of loss. Another pun sits in "Sorrow's springs are the same", where "springs" means the sources of water, a welling-up of tears, while also echoing the season in the title.
The sound of the poem matters as much as its sense. Hopkins called his own method sprung rhythm, which counts stresses rather than syllables, and the lines here are short and heavy, each beat pressing on the one before. The rhymes are quick and often playful, such as "grieving / unleaving" and "older / colder." Some even split a word across the line break: "you / With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?" This gives the speaker's opening a light, coaxing, almost sing-song air. Then the rhyme tightens into the triplet "sigh / lie / why", where the last word delivers the poem's first real answer.
The closing lines slow down. "Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed" works by alliteration and by ordering. First comes the heart, then the ghost (the spirit or soul), and only afterwards, if ever, the mouth or the mind. Knowledge of death arrives before language or reasoning can catch it. The final couplet rhymes "born for" with "mourn for", so that birth and mourning are bound together in sound as well as in meaning. The grief is already part of being alive.
What makes the poem remarkable is how much it fits into fifteen lines without turning cold or preachy. It takes a child's sadness seriously, as an early and accurate perception of the world, and the speaker is moved by it. He begins by correcting Margaret and ends by learning from her.