I first came across “Spring and Fall”—as in a similar poem, Frost's “Nothing Gold Can Say”—through two 1980s teen movies. The Frost poem appeared in Copola's adaptation of S. E. Hinton's popular young adult novel, The Outsiders, and in Hopkins' Vision Quest, a forgettable film about a young man trying to find himself by taking on the unbeaten state champion in a wrestling match. (Our hero beats him!) In both films, the themes of the pains and triumphs of growing up are presented in familiar formulas, and the poems lend a sense of gravity to that theme. In any case, many of my friends in high school, who otherwise would never have read poetry, knew these poems and could recognize them, having heard them in a movie. (The same can be said of my generation in terms of another Victorian poem in our reading, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” memorably recited in class by Alfalfa in one of the “Our Gang” plays.) That said , hearing these poems in contexts outside of academia really resonated with me, and I'd like to use this article as an opportunity to examine exactly what gives "Spring and Autumn" in particular its haunting power. Perhaps Hopkins holds great strength for me on a personal level because he was the first poet I studied in my freshman English seminar, where my teacher, a woman from Wales, read aloud passages from “The Wreck of the Deutschland ". The line “Warm grave of a gray womb life” still resonates in my memory. The effect of this line, softness, comes from the soft consonants "w", "m", "b", "l", etc., combined with the long vowel sounds in "womb", "grey" and "tomba ", leave me with the sensation of what it must feel like to float - and die - underwater. T...... half of the sheet ......dressed directly by the poet. Finally, and returning to issues of sound and rhythm, “Margherita” has two rhythmic constructions in the poem. Hopkins insists on a particular rhythm in the first line in which the name has accents on the first and third syllables, forcing the pronunciation of all three syllables: “Mar-ga-ret.” However, at the end of the poem, Hopkins does not place these stress marks on the name, inviting the same kind of fall we hear at the end of the line, with the word “for.” I would say that the only accents in the last line are on Margaret's first syllable and the word "mourning." As a person in the world, as a young person, as the recipient of a poem and also as a sound, “Margherita” falls. Intellectually, I can come to terms with the message of this poem, but it is the sounds and rhythms of Margaret's fall that are truly chilling..