Goldengrove

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)

A few years ago, not long after fellow writer Curtis Cottrell and a few other friends had shared commentary on "Spring and Fall," I happened to come across these old headstones, both of which seem to go perfectly with Hopkins' poem (more pics).

The stone says that Margaret was the "Consort of" Lewis Davisson.
Did they live at the edge? Drink life to the lees?
(Thanks to "Tombstone Tourist @ A Grave Interest"
for additional information on how to read old gravestones.)

Both tombstones are located
a few miles from my house in West Lafayette, Indiana
in nearly forgotten Burton Cemetery ~ Tippecanoe County

This once rural graveyard
now stands on the corner of a busy highway,
adjacent to the parking lot of a Menards DIY;
probably not the final resting place that Margaret & Lewis
envisioned for themselves at the time . . . kind of sad.

It is Margaret we mourn for.

***************************

Here is my friend Victoria in 1978 at another,
as yet unidentified Indiana cemetery.
We are on a quest to find this long lost grave.
Any leads for us?
"Everretta T. Parsons ~ AD 1815"

Is it Everretta that Victoria mourns for?
Or is it Victoria?