Love for a Child...

("Spring", Hopkins)

From beginning to end, the diction chosen for this poem add an aura of class and ambiance. The center of the work is to describe the beauty of spring and innocence of life. Starting with "thrush egg's" instead of bird eggs and "echoing timber" to describe the awakened forest, the reader is bought into the enchantment of the piece. The overly perfect images of "glassy peartree leaves and blooms" and "racing lambs" intensify the ideal that spring is a new innocent beginning.

In the second half of the work, when the focus turns to the tarnishing of innocence and world outside of spring, the diction transforms into more negative diction. Phrases such as "sour with sin" and "before it cloys" (which means to grow to have distaste after an overabundance) convey the evil of the world. The "innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy" is soon lost, almost as quickly as the season changes. Overall the diction of this work exaggerates the themes of the poem in order to bring attention to the themes of the loss of innocence and the joys of spring.