Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Spring and Death”

Grande-Bretagne   1894

Genre de texte
poème

Contexte
This poem has been cited in its entirety.

Commentaires
Ce poème pourrait avoir été inspiré par la mort de son jeune amant, Digby Dolben, qui s'est noyé en 1867 à l'âge de 19 ans -- un événement dont le poète ne s'est jamais remis.

Texte original

Texte témoin
The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Norman H. MacKenzie, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 17-18.




Rêve du poète

La Mort au printemps

I had a dream. A wondrous thing:
It seem’d an evening in the Spring;
--A little sickness in the air
From too much fragrance everywhere:--
As I walk’d a stilly wood,
Sudden, Death before me stood:
In a hollow lush and damp,
He seem’d a dismal mirky stamp
On the flowers that were seen
His charnelhouse-grate ribs between,
And with coffin-black he barr’d the green.
‘Death,’ said I, ‘what do you here
At this Spring season of the year?’
‘I mark the flowers ere the prime
Which I may tell at Autumn-time.’
Ere I had further questions made
Death was vanish’d from the glade.
Then I saw that he had bound
Many trees and flowers round
With a subtle web of black,
And that such a sable track
Lay along the grasses green
From the spot where he had been.
But the Spring-tide pass’d the same;
Summer was as full of flame;
Autumn-time no earlier came.
And the flowers that he had tied,
As I mark’d, not always died
Sooner than their mates; and yet
Their fall was fuller of regret;
It seem’d so hard and dismal thing,
Death, to mark them in the Spring.

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