Literary Hub Shares Excerpt From Kay Ryan's Forthcoming Selected Prose

In this essay, Ryan writes about Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall," and his "preposterously beautiful" poetry. "Its difficult syntax compels its reader to submit to its world almost immediately," she exclaims. More, from there: 

Well, even before we get to the improbable “man, you—can you?” the neologisms have altered our minds: “Goldengrove unleaving.” I don’t know if Goldengrove is an actual stand of deciduous trees or not; I vote for Hopkins having invented this tract name to carry all the beauty of loss in a single word. Hear the sounds of “go, go” in Goldengrove; simply to invoke a golden grove is to say it is going. The poem reminds me of Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”—both poems so immense and sad to the point of peace. There is no escape from loss—unless the pure beauty of the poems provides one, as it does for me.

But back to “unleaving.” The new word is generated, I would imagine, by the unstudied opening line, “Margaret, are you grieving?” That’s something Hopkins might have written quickly, and it would have given him—always ready to forge new words—the rhyming word “unleaving,” which of course just means ordinary losing-its-leaves, and is a convenience. But it also hap- pens to operate as a pun on leaving’s other sense—going away. Here it is unleaving, of course, but the “leave,” like the “go” in Goldengrove, is planted in our mind’s ear.

This couplet, “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?” is as easy on the tongue as the following couplet is impossible: “Leaves, like the things of man, you / With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?” Let me just say that my hat is off to Hopkins for this. I’ve never really examined this poem before, hav- ing submitted to it utterly at the age of nineteen. This is the point at which Hopkins compels us to take off our clothes and enter his river. It is wildly strained, forced, manipulated, and—we already feel—worth it. If we are not compelled to submit in some way to a poem it cannot change us. That makes perfect sense, now that I’ve written it, but I don’t think I ever thought of it before.

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