"Goldengrove Unleaving": Hopkins' "Spring and Fall," Christina Rossetti's "Mirrors of Life and Death," and the Politics of Inclusion (Gerard Manley Hopkins) (Essay) (Victorian Poetry Studies) (Critical Essay‪)‬

(For Isobel Armstrong) The now quite familiar argument for the inspiration behind Hopkins' "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" asserts that lines from the poem describing Margaret's poignant response to the falling leaves may have been derived from George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. (1) As the argument goes, the little girl at the novel's opening, whether Maggie Tulliver or Eliot's authorial persona, becomes Hopkins' Margaret, both of whom lament the all-too-soon demise of the season that in turn analogizes the ephemeralness of things. Hopkins had only recently read The Mill on the Floss (1860), and on February 22, 1881, had even solicited John Henry Newman's estimation of Eliot. Heretofore unknown, however, are the subtle echoes, perhaps even direct borrowings, between Hopkins' "Spring and Fall," his "song to the decaying year" ("Now I am minded"), and Christina Rossetti's "Mirrors of Life and Death," with its "long sequence of mourning images." (2) This essay, then, seeks to document the poem's indebtedness to Christina Rossetti and, as well, Hopkins' profound desire to be included in an anthology connected to her.